A BUS company has been slammed by parents who claim their three children were told to get off a bus "in the middle of nowhere" in the dark.

Ami Udal, aged 15, was travelling on a Stagecoach bus from Basingstoke to Camberley with her sister Chloe, 12, and her three-year-old brother Ethan.

The three were going to visit their grandmother but had a shock when the driver told them their Megarider tickets only took them as far as The Hatch on the A30. They say he ordered them off even though it was 4.30pm on a Friday.

Ami said: "The driver shouted up the stairs at us. When I went down to speak to him, he refused to move the bus until we got off."

The youngsters, of Ferndale Close, Beggarwood, had boarded the bus in Basingstoke town centre, as they had done before on several occasions, with the same tickets, when going to Camberley.

But they had no money, so Ami phoned her parents on her mobile phone. They advised her to tell the driver that their grandmother would be meeting them in Camberley and that she would pay the shortfall.

The children say the driver, however, would not agree to that.

Ami said: "When my brother heard we couldn't see Nan, he started crying.

"But, then, two girls who were sitting downstairs came forward and offered to pay the fare for us."

With the fares having been paid, the driver continued to Camberley.

But the children's parents Monique and Clive are furious their children might have been thrown off a bus in the middle of nowhere.

Mr Udal, a policeman, said: "How could they ever think about putting them off the bus in the dark? It's just not safe - you just don't know who's about.

"We were not trying to defraud the bus company. It was a mistake - that's all it was. We would have gone into the bus station and paid the difference."

Andrew Jarvis, operations director of Stagecoach in Hampshire, denied that the children would have been ejected.

He said: "The driver confirmed that he would not, under any circumstances, have removed the children from the bus."

He said, as a gesture of goodwill, he would be happy to replace the Megarider tickets with Megarider Gold tickets, which are valid throughout the Stagecoach operations in the South.

"I can fully understand the upset that this incident must have caused to the three children involved," he said.

"However, after interview, the driver confirmed that he was following the normal company procedure and that his next step would have been to contact the Basingstoke control room for advice."