Thomas Pringle (Donegal South West, Independent)
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42. To ask the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport if he will provide comparative figures for the amount of subvention paid to Bus Éireann and Dublin Bus compared to other European public bus services; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [47180/13]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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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 are not normally separated out from the other modes such as light and heavy rail and are 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 subsidies 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. It is unsound to draw European wide conclusions from such a limited data-set. 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 35% of their total PSO revenues. However if the payment for the Free Travel Scheme is included, 46% 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. In the NTA's recently published economic analyis of Direct Award Bus Contract in the Dublin market, it was stated that a comparative analysis of subvention levels across Europe indicated that levels of public transport subvention vary between 35 and 60 percent of revenue. It added that when all State interventions (including the PSO subvention, Free Travel Scheme, tax foregone as a result of the Taxsaver scheme, emergency funding and funding for the purchase of new buses) are taken into account, the level of subvention to Dublin Bus is at the upper end of the range and approaches 50%.