A bus firm has suggested age discrimination laws may have been partially responsible for a crash involving a 77-year-old driver who had a worked a 75 hour week before a crash which killed two people.

The company was given what is believed to be a record fine of £2.3m for failing to act on safety warnings about a driver involved in a fatal bus crash.

The managing director of the company, owned by Stagecoach, has suggested there should be a statutory maximum legal age for drivers of buses and other heavy vehicles - and hinted that age discrimination laws mean bosses cannot ask bus drivers to retire for reasons relating to their age.

Midland Red (South) had pleaded guilty to two offences contrary to the Health and Safety at Work Act, by permitting relief driver Kailash Chander to continue working despite what a judge called "repeated" warnings about his driving.

Chander, who was 77, made a "fundamentally and tragically fatal error" by mistakenly hitting the accelerator and crashing into Sainsbury's in Coventry city centre at 20mph on October 3 2015.

His actions led to the deaths of seven-year-old passenger Rowan Fitzgerald, who was sitting on the top deck of Chander's vehicle, and 76-year-old pedestrian Dora Hancox.