Ms Anne Graham:

We all have to recognise that significant Government and NTA support was given through the Covid period to protect the industry and retain vehicles and drivers to be there when the demand grew, as it is now growing, for their services.

The actions we have taken to support the industry are as follows. They currently have no licence fees to pay. We believe entry to the industry is at a relatively low level and cost. The driver recruitment campaign we are about to undertake will begin immediately. We will give information to the public to encourage new drivers into the industry to boost the general availability. There is no doubt that the drivers in the industry are not attracted to operate at night time between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. The maximum fare proposal that has been approved is set out to incentivise that by providing they will be paid at a higher rate for operating at peak hours, which are 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. We hope that will encourage more drivers to operate at that time. A number of supports are available for entrants to the industry. We provide grants for the provision and conversion of vehicles to be wheelchair-accessible and now the e-SPSV grant as well.

On the public transport side, we are committed to providing additional bus services which operate on a 24-7 basis. Our operators are struggling to provide the services they are contracted to operate at the moment.

While we can try to do as much as possible with the resources that are available to see if we can extend the working hours of our public transport services, we must be realistic about what driver resource is available to be able to do those additional 24-7 services. However, they are built into the improvements in BusConnects. One more 24-hour service was put in place recently, the N4, and there will be additional services provided this year. We said we would look at the Nitelink bus services to see if we could extend them and have them operating more frequently. We are also looking at the fares charged on Nitelink to see if we can encourage more usage of those services. We will do as much as we can on the public transport side to provide for additional service and to provide for that additional demand as we grow and encourage the taxi market to grow and recover post Covid.