Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)
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272. To ask the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport if he will provide figures comparing the State subvention to Bus Éireann with State subventions to coach services in other OECD countries. [24678/13]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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I am unaware of such a comparison having been carried out. It is difficult to carry out a comparison of subvention levels between transport authorities internationally for a number of reasons, some of which are: the subvention payments for the bus mode is not normally separated out from the other modes such as light and heavy rail and is usually presented as the subvention for all the public transport in the particular region; some transport operators and authorities report transport revenues as a single item and don’t identify the revenue associated with subvention; some transport authorities centralise the marketing and customer facing activity which doesn’t get reflected in the provision to operators.

The 2009 Deloitte Report, Cost and Efficiency Review of Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann highlighted that grants and subsidies to other comparable  bus operations outside Ireland  varied greatly. The Report also noted that it was more difficult  to identify comparable operators for Bus Éireann  given their mix of services.

While the Deloitte Report is frequently cited as providing a Europe-wide comparison of PSO levels to bus operators, this is not the case and it is wrong to represent the study as such. The Deloitte Report compared the PSO provided to Dublin Bus to the subsidises provided to operators in Brussels, Zurich, Amsterdam, Lyon and London and in the case of Bus Éireann,  compared the PSO received by it to national operators in the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland.

Despite the limitations in developing such analyses, I am advised that on the basis of recent research undertaken on behalf of the National Transport Authority (NTA), the subvention levels for operations similar to Bus Éireann vary between 32% and 70%. This is based on a comparison of subvention levels in 4 countries, namely, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland.

If the Public Service Obligation payment is the only subsidy considered, the subvention to Bus Éireann in 2012 was 34% of their total PSO revenues. However if the payment for the Free Travel Scheme is included, 45% of Bus Éireann revenues are subsidised by the State. This places Bus Éireann in the low to middle of the range of subsidy payments of those countries compared.