Ms Anne Graham:

Yes, we will provide and purchase the PSO bus services in the future.

One of the issues in planning ahead in public transport is that we have some oversight as to what our capital is going to be. There is certainly the ability to be able to plan for capital projects. On the PSO side, because we are subject to the budgetary process, as is the Department, we do not know from year to year what our PSO budget will be. One of the things that the operators would like to see is a multi-annual budget for PSO, which would allow us to plan better for the introduction of new services.