Ms Anne Graham:

We are moving in our contracted services to increase the level of wheelchair accessibility. We are going through a retendering of the local link services this year. More than 1,000 routes will be retendered. There will be an obligation in those tenders to provide a wheelchair accessible vehicle within a certain timeframe. We know that the level of wheelchair accessibility is not at the level we would like it to be in the fleet but we propose to allow a period of time in the tender for operators to get a wheelchair accessible vehicle to operate the service. While we do not have the level of accessibility currently in the rural transport services that we would like, even though it is quite high, we want to achieve a higher level of accessibility through the retendering of those services this year.