Mr. Stephen Kent:

We operate services by licence. They are commercial licences that we hold and we have to try to operate. An issue we have at the moment is that when operating commercial services, we have to ensure they are sustainable. It is as simple as that. It is not that we do not want to operate connectivity. A huge amount of our purpose is to connect people to who and what matters to them. We say that openly as a company but there is only so far we can do it. To do that, we have been reliant on funding from the NTA. Where it is in place, we have stood up and been able to deliver and deploy that. However, on other routes, where there is no possibility of revenue covering our costs, we get to a place where, as a commercial semi-State company, we have to make sure we can keep it all operating and we did not want to endanger the other routes that have a greater chance of coming back. Those decisions, difficult as they may have been, have been taken so we can maintain connectivity for 150 other communities on the other 150 routes.

This was an existential crisis and we are not out of it. There is a way to go in this Covid piece so we have to monitor it. We have to make those decisions now and we will continue to do so. It will be a commercial decision. If routes come back in the future, we will look and if there is an opportunity to run them, we will try to run them. At the moment, there is no prospect and we are trying to make a decision for the rest of the network.