History
First Hampshire & Dorset was created out of various different smaller companies which were merged once First had acquired them.
FirstBus acquired bus services in Portsmouth in 1996 from Transit Holdings trading as Red Admiral & Blue Admiral, which in turn had taken over the Portsmouth CityBus operations under the title of Southdown Portsmouth.
First Group purchased Southampton Citybus in 1997 and after a brief period of using the Citybus name the operation was renamed First Southampton. In 1999 First Southampton was merged with First Provincial to form First Hampshire. This later became First Hampshire & Dorset. The company is facing growing competition in Southampton from Go-Ahead owned Bluestar.
The former Southdown operations continue to be operated by Southdown Motor Services Limited t/a Stagecoach Coastline, or Stagecoach in Portsmouth (Portsmouth area services) or Stagecoach in the South Downs (Chichester/Worthing services).
FirstBus (later renamed FirstGroup) had previously taken over the bus services in Gosport and Fareham formerly operated by People's Provincial and Hants & Dorset and amalgamated the services in the East Hampshire area as First Provincial.
Further acquisitions of the bus operations of Southampton Citybus and Southern National were made, with the company being renamed First Hampshire & Dorset in 2003.
In December 2006 the Traffic Commissioner fined First Hampshire & Dorset £35,000 for failing to run one in five buses in Portsmouth on time. The operator received an earlier formal warning over timekeeping in June 2005. The Traffic Commissioners' nationally accepted criteria for the operation of a bus journey is running more than one minute early or more than five minutes late (otherwise the journey is deemed not to have run). In its defence, First Hampshire & Dorset had submitted that Portsmouth City Council's five year plan to resurface every street to improve street lighting had severely affected the operator's ability to maintain services, something rejected by the Traffic Commissioner. First Hampshire & Dorset now publishes reliability and punctuality data on its website.
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