Ms Anne Graham:

I will respond to this. We have seen from the experiment this year that fares and fare levels drive passenger numbers. What we are concerned about now is that if we do any further development of this, as in further lowering or further extension of discounts, we do not have the capacity to cater for it. We are finding that we have to deal with capacity issues in the network. If we make any changes now to further reduce fares, it would make this situation worse and make the customer experience worse. Long-term, we would like to be able to retain a reasonable fare level.

There is a lot of debate about free fares and we have done some research on their impact. We found that in many places where they have been put in place, they does not reduce the use of the car mode but transfer people who would walk and cycle onto public transport. Overall sustainable transport use does not necessarily rise in association with free fares. It has been a very good experiment to see the response when fares were lowered. At present we do not propose any further lowering of fares.