BUS giant Stagecoach is enticing East Lancashire bus drivers to head for the streets of Oxford and its dreaming spires with the promise of hotel accommodation at £90 a night.

Drivers are also being offered 20 per cent more pay than they are getting in East Lancashire as company bosses try to solve their recruitment problems.

Unemployment is low in Oxfordshire, which is making hiring bus drivers difficult for Stagecoach chiefs who recently had to axe nine routes across the county recently.

The East Lancashire drivers have been joined by other drivers from Morecambe and Glasgow.

Drivers start on a salary of £14,500, rising to £20,000 for those driving the flagship Oxford tube coaches which run from Oxford to London. Earlier this year, Stagecoach targeted Oxford students in a recruitment campaign.

But despite offering a package which includes a contributory pension scheme and free life insurance, Stagecoach still struggled to find enough drivers in the city.

Inglis Lyon, managing director of Stagecoach Oxford, said: "Like other bus companies we are struggling with recruitment and we will do everything we can to get our staffing rotas up to strength.

"We hope there will be single men and women who will be attracted by the idea of six months' free accommodation and hopefully at the end of that time they will be persuaded to stay in Oxford.

"We get the drivers rooms from wherever we can because accommodation is hard to come by."

"We are in an interesting situation in Oxford with drivers from Lancashire and Scotland. There is a lot of banter between the drivers and between customers and drivers."

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.