We have a privatised bus system, as I've explained on many occasions, which is a legacy of Conservative privatisation in the 1980s, and we are living with the reality of that now, and it has failed; the business model has failed, there is market failure here, and we're going to see cuts and a disappearing of vital public services. None of us want to see that, but we're also living in an age of austerity; again, a political choice by her party's Governments, where public funding has been reduced next year and we simply do not have the funding available to continue to invest in propping up private companies that are not able to run commercially viable services at the rate that we were through the pandemic. We've been able to find some additional funding this year to extend the scheme temporarily, but the money simply is not in the budget to be able to continue that into the future. I wish it was; it is not, I'm afraid. And I just can't get away from that reality, much as I would like to.

So, I fully concede that this is a pretty grim situation that none of us want to see, but our options are limited. The best we've been able to manage is to get a reprieve for the industry, to work closely with them to try and design as smooth a glide path out as we possibly can, but I can't say with any certainty that we're going to be able to manage that, and there's always the danger that commercial companies will simply decide themselves—which they're free to do in a commercial deregulated bus system—to withdraw services, because they're already having trouble recruiting, retaining and training bus drivers, and being able to keep to the advertised schedule as it is.

So, the bus industry is facing a number of different challenges, and the fact that passengers haven't returned to make those commercial services viable is a profound one, but there's a limit to what the Government can do with this budget settlement from her Government.