Mr. Kevin Doyle:

There is a working capital requirement in the NTA. There is a contract between the NTA and Go-Ahead, and payment must be made to Go-Ahead, but the payment falls due in advance of moneys being transferred from the overall PSO pot from the Department. That is one aspect, while the other is that this is a gross-cost contract. It is not like the Dublin Bus contract, which, like Bus Éireann, collects all the fare revenue and keeps it. The difference between its costs and the fare revenue is the PSO payment to those operators.

In the case of the two Go-Ahead contracts and the Bus Éireann contract for Waterford, they are gross-cost contracts, which means the NTA collects the fare revenue and Go-Ahead does not keep it. It is paid an amount to provide the particular services. Fare revenue is only estimated and, therefore, there is a revenue risk for the NTA and the fare revenue might not be as robust as forecast. For that reason, it needs to hold working capital within the NTA to counter it.