Well, it's more than just warm words. We have spent £150 million since the start of the pandemic in saving the bus industry in Wales. So, let's be very clear about that: without the help and intervention of the Welsh Government, the bus industry would have gone bankrupt; there wouldn't be any bus services. So, I think it's only fair to reflect that we have put our money where our mouth is.

Now, the whole point of the bus emergency scheme—the clue is in the title—it was for an emergency; it was never meant as a long-term piece of funding, and it was always intended to come to an end. Now, the challenge we have is that the patronage levels have not returned to the pre-pandemic levels. So, we are supporting a bus network that no longer has the same behaviours as the one that came before. So, in a sense, we're ossifying a bus network. Even the industry agrees that we do need to rationalise and re-look at the bus networks in Wales.

Now, we've been doing this far more generously than England has; we've sustained a far greater use of bus provision than has happened the other side of the border. I think any fair look would look at the cuts that are being made in England right now, where the bus industry has faced a cliff edge right across the UK because of this disconnect between the reality, the behaviours, and the economics of the use of public transport. So, we've got a genuine problem here, in that usage rates, particularly amongst pensioners, have not returned to the rates that we want to see. And we simply do not have the money to keep sustaining the bus emergency scheme at the levels that were true during the height of the pandemic. So, we have a problem.

We are working closely with the industry. Julie James and I met with the operators on Friday of last week. We've been meeting right throughout this week, and we'll be meeting again with them this Friday, because they've hit the deadline of when they have to give notice to the traffic commissioner for handing back these contracts. We've spoken to the traffic commissioner about offering some discretion about when that trigger point is reached, and they are certainly open to being pragmatic about that. And what we want is to taper off the scheme, not face a cliff edge. But we do have to end the support, sooner rather than later. So, we're trying our best to come up with a solution that does not see lots of routes being surrendered, but the financial position we're in—our budget—is very, very, very challenging, and we're working through this week to see what we can do.