Ms Anne Graham:

We have responded to a number of parliamentary questions on this issue. We are undertaking a comprehensive review of fares on our regional bus services and our regional rail services. We have spoken many times about the problem where the short-hop zone goes into the intercity rail fares. There is too big a jump and it is not as fair a structure as we would like. Work is ongoing to see can we smooth that out and provide a more balanced and fairer move between the short-hop zone and the intercity fares and avoid a jump in price at those boundaries. That work is still ongoing. It is quite a complicated piece of work. We want to be in a position to put forward what is required to be done by the end of the year so that can go into the budgetary discussions because, obviously, an increased public service obligation, PSO, could be required to implement that. That is where we are on those.