Transport Made Simple’s Rising Star: Charlie Poulter enjoys placement year success at TMS
Wrapping up a year as Transport Made Simple’s first Placement Student, and what comes next
Charlie Poulter joined Transport Made Simple (TMS) in June 2025 on placement from his BSc Politics and International Relations degree at the University of Bath. Charlie’s role was a brand new position created with a focus on stakeholder engagement, giving TMS dedicated capacity for external engagement work with elected representatives and public transport user groups.
Charlie’s placement year comes to an end in May 2026, but he’ll still be part of team TMS, taking up a part time role as Product and Partnerships Lead alongside his final year of university.
Take a look at some of the projects Charlie worked on during his year at TMS…
Supporting a major acquisition with stakeholder engagement and communications
In October 2025, TMS acquired Go East Anglia from the Go-Ahead Group, bringing the Konectbus and Hedingham & Chambers brands into the Group. Charlie spent the autumn and winter introducing the new owners to stakeholders across the Go East Anglia bus network, meeting parish and town councils, local media, bus user groups, and local MPs. The conversations have fed into a number of subsequent service changes, as TMS works to deliver a network that better meets the needs of passengers across the network, introducing more direct routes, later journeys, and other enhancements including simpler fares and enhanced passenger information provision.
Coordinating the bidding process for Essex’s Love Your Bus Scheme
Working with parish and town councils across Essex, Charlie project managed the ideation and submission of bids to the county council’s Department for Transport funded Love Your Bus Two grant scheme. This secured over £720k of funding for 15 service enhancements across 11 Central Connect routes. Charlie will be project-managing the implementation of each of these schemes and gained experience across the business learning how to design and timetable services, write compelling bids, and effectively engage with local organisations and the public sector.
Innovating our data analysis capabilities with Network Insights
When Charlie joined he took on KPI reporting to the local authorities TMS work in partnership with, alongside corporate clients such as housing developers. To speed up this process and get more out of our data, he built Network Insights – a map-based dashboard for reporting KPIs with an AI-powered customer service feedback analysis that feeds in automatically. The platform will be launching later in the summer for use by the group’s network planning team and for our external partners and clients.
And a whole variety of other things…
Alongside those projects, Charlie produced TMS’ quarterly internal newsletter, learnt the ins-and-outs of the Central Connect bus network by handling customer services emails during his first couple of months, and represented the business in cross-operator working groups across the network. In July he also had the opportunity to travel to San Sebastian to meet with Irizar and visit their factory, where three brand new high specification coaches for Simonds (part of TMS) have just been manufactured.
At the inaugural TMS Awards in May 2026 Charlie was named the winner of the Rising Star award, and was presented with his trophy by Group Managing Director Peter Nathanail who said “Having Charlie join our team this year has been fantastic. Alongside his excellent work engaging with the local community, which has generated fantastic feedback praising his proactive approach to improving the bus services we operate, Charlie has brought new ideas and fresh thinking to our Commercial team, and helped us find a whole new way of looking at the “product” of bus travel. We are committed to delivering high quality local bus services for the communities we serve, and Charlie has made a significant contribution to that this year”.
What’s next?
From May, Charlie is staying on part-time through his final year as Product & Partnerships Lead. He’ll project-manage delivery of the Love Your Bus schemes he secured funding for and use what he’s learnt so far this year to inform an update to TMS’ product strategy based on feedback from customers and insights from the team and shifts in the wider industry.