Bus driver Steve Hurst set up Spirit Buses having spotted a ‘gap that’s long needed filling’. The Coquetdale valley in Northumberland national park has long had it all – except public transport. All that changed this autumn, when a local man fulfilled a life-long ambition to launch his own bus company to link up the villages of his valley, providing a “lifeline” to pensioners and teens without driving licences who were otherwise stuck in their homes. Read more in The Guardian, 4 January 2015