Customer Corner : Wrightbus – Hymns, Hustle And Cummins-Powered Bullshit

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Ballymena did not “stumble” into this. Wrightbus went into administration in 2019 and spat around 1,200 people into the street while the town was still reeling from Michelin’s closure. Generations on the line, gone. Families wrecked. And through it all, the Wright family played a double act: Christian pillars on a Sunday, corporate wrecking crew the rest of the week.

Millions funnelled to a megachurch. Jobs torched. Directors now staring down bans. And through the whole saga one constant hums away in the background – Cummins engines bolted under Wrightbus shells, diesel in the bloodstream while everyone talks hydrogen halos and salvation.

Holy Cash, Empty Pockets

Let’s start with the bit that still sticks in Ballymena’s throat: the money.

Between 2012 and 2017, Wrightbus parent Cornerstone handed over more than £15 million to Green Pastures, the evangelical church founded and led by Jeff Wright. That is not “a strong relationship with our faith community”. That is the company’s veins tapped to feed the pulpit.

While the donations flowed, the business was wobbling. Orders were drying up, margins squeezed, warning lights flashing. Workers found out later that the church was sitting on multi-million pound surpluses while the factory was choking. No wonder they marched on Green Pastures when the collapse hit, shouting for answers while Jeff preached peace and purpose inside.

The church had grand plans: “Project Nehemiah”, a Christian village with houses, a supermarket, dorms – the full holy campus. It sounds less like local outreach and more like SimCity for control freaks.

Inside Wrightbus, staff talked about a culture soaked in church influence. Allegations of pressure to tithe, to show up at prayer meetings, of promotions lining up a bit too neatly with who was in the pews. Those are workers’ accounts, not court findings, so we’ll call them what they are: reported experiences. The pattern is still ugly – faith blurred into HR in a town where saying no was not a simple option.

Cornerstone and the Wrights insist everything was legal, signed off, dividends, all above board. Maybe it was legal. Nobody is saying they snuck in with a balaclava and a bin bag. What we are saying is simple: if you can peel £15 million out of a company in a place like Ballymena, then watch 1,200 people lose their jobs, your moral compass is not “slightly off”. It is buried in the nearest skip.

Directors, Disciples And The Long Road To The Dock

The story did not end when Jo Bamford rode in, bought the shell and rehired a chunk of the workforce. The state took a look at the carcass and did not like what it saw.

In 2022, the Department for the Economy kicked off director disqualification proceedings against a record 14 former Wrightbus figures – including Jeff Wright and other family members. It is the biggest case of its kind in Northern Ireland. Years on, nine are still contesting bans in the High Court.

Nobody gets hauled through a process of that size because of “difficult market conditions”. Disqualification is what you reach for when you suspect behaviour that should bar people from running companies again. The allegations centre on how the firm was run in the run-up to collapse: who was really in charge, where the money went, what duties were owed and ignored. The court will decide the fine print. The headline is already loud enough: the state thinks this was not just bad luck, it was bad conduct.

Around the church, things frayed too. The charity regulator opened an investigation. Board members walked away citing “abusive and threatening” messages. Jeff Wright stepped down as lead pastor after a review into staff complaints. This is not some neat morality play where the bus business sank and the church sailed on. The whole empire is now under scrutiny, and rightly so.

Cummins: Diesel In The Baptism Water

Strip away the worship songs and the PR and you get to the powertrain. Wrightbus has a long, cosy history with Cummins.

Those “next generation” StreetDeck diesel buses? Cummins B6.7 Euro VI engines. New coach orders? Cummins X-series grunt. Wrightbus likes to talk about a “blended approach” – hydrogen here, electric there – but diesel is still doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

And Cummins is not some neutral supplier. This is the same company that agreed to pay a record $1.675 billion penalty in the United States for fitting defeat devices to nearly a million engines. Software tricks to make trucks look clean on the test bench while they spewed nitrogen oxides on real roads. A diesel con so big it joined the same hall of shame as Volkswagen.

So on one side you have Wrightbus, which let cash drain into a church while its workforce walked into the dole office, and whose ex-directors now fight bans. On the other side you have Cummins, freshly fined for environmental cheating on an industrial scale. Together they are selling “sustainable transport solutions”.

It is not a partnership. It is a support group for people who think consequences are for other folk.

Green Paint, Red Flags

Under Bamford, Wrightbus leans hard into the green branding: hydrogen, zero emissions routes, saving cities from their own fumes. Fine. Nobody sane is against cleaner buses or decent jobs in Ballymena.

But this industry loves amnesia. A few years on, and you are meant to forget the £15 million tithed away, the protests outside Green Pastures, the families who still have not fully recovered. You are meant to forget who supplied the diesel while everyone rehearsed their sustainability talking points.

TCAP is not here to stop Wrightbus ever building another bus. But we are here to make sure that when Cummins and its customers stand up and beam about “net zero”, the ghosts in the room are named.

If you are boarding a shiny new Wrightbus with a Cummins badge, remember: the wheels are turning on more than fuel. They are turning on a town that was gutted, a church that gorged, a supplier that cheated the air, and a system that still lets this lot call themselves the good guys.

Ballymena deserved better. So does every place whose public transport is quietly wired into this kind of sanctified horseshit.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Sources

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