Ms Anne Graham:

This particular challenge occurred over the summer months. As the Chair knows we have been coming in and out of Covid and we had another Covid challenge in March and the spring of this year. Fortunately, at the same time the Government gave us funding to be able to do fare reductions, which has increased the number of people coming back onto our public transport system. When we are planning, as we were right at the beginning of the year, we have to look forward as much as we can to see what numbers are going to be travelling and we did not think we were going to be back up at the level of journeys we currently see. We are delighted to see this level but when we were forward planning with the operators coming out of Covid, we foresaw a much slower increase in passenger journeys and passengers coming back to the system, which would have allowed us to tweak, especially in the peak time, because we have not seen the number of people travelling back at peak, as people are working from home. We felt that resource was going to be available for us to reallocate it-----