Ms Miriam Flynn:

I thank the Deputy. We have looked and continue to look at the school year every year in conjunction with the Department to see if there are things we can do to improve the process for the following year. The Deputy is correct in that we have looked at advancing our payment deadlines over the last three years and we have found this very successful because it gives us a little bit of extra time to try to start issuing tickets earlier.

In relation to the late applications, we undertake a great deal of communications. I refer to the Department, and Mr. Ó Ruairc has already referred to the significant media campaigns that take place in the weeks leading up to the closing deadline. We have sent out more than 270,000 emails directly to families to try to encourage them to pay by the deadline. We sent over 20,000 SMS messages targeting people directly who had school transport last year. The Deputy is right that the critical thing for us is to try to have the applications in on time. Our procurement is significant as part of our school year planning. We have over 1,500 routes that went out to tender as part of our five-year procurement process. We actually start that planning in local offices in October and November because we put the routes out to tender in February. This year, we were actually earlier in awarding some of those routes as well, and we issued our first round of awards at the end of May.

As I said, all these endeavours are to try to contribute to helping the process. We have 90,000 tickets issued to date. We find the earlier we can get tickets issued - going to the Deputy's point - the more certainty it provides for our customers, so we are still working to try to get tickets as early as possible. There are always challenges, unfortunately, in terms of trying to figure out exactly how much capacity we have available. I think it is recognised that our local offices and our planning teams do a huge amount to see if anything else can be done and that they have left no stone unturned in terms of trying to facilitate people before they would turn them down.