Ms Anne Graham:

The Deputy has asked me to address a number of issues. I indicated that a private operator which has a licence service is not obliged to continue that service if it is unviable on a commercial basis. It could be for other reasons that it would want to withdraw from the service. This is covered by the legislation under which we operate on behalf of the Government. There is no doubt that there is more protection for services that are subject to a PSO contract and any changes in regard to those services needs our approval. The only time we would want to consider that would be if we were not in a position to fund services. We try to protect as many public transport services as we can because it is in our interest to make sure there are as many people as possible using public transport, but we do not have the same level of control over a licence service as we do over a subsidised service.

I do not accept that there is over-saturation on the intercity routes. We have introduced some competition in those markets because there has been a demand for it.

There has been a demand for customers to have shorter journeys, using the motorway network to provide services from city to city, and there has been growth in that market because some operators have responded to that demand by seeking licences. In thinking about the public transport customer, we thought it was necessary to provide the licences related to those services.

I am not sure what the Deputy means about carrying out a review of licensed operators. We have not carried out a review of the different services. We have undertaken a review of the legislation as it stands and what we would like to see in terms of changes to the legislation to ensure we have a better regulation of the licensed market. That is the review that has been carried out by the National Transport Authority, NTA. We have not looked at individual licences. We track them in that we know what licences exist and we seek basic information relating to those services to try to produce statistics on their growth, which we publish on a yearly basis. We have not carried out a detailed analysis of all the routes and we do not propose to do that at this stage.