Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 15 December 2021
I will deal with conditionality in a moment, but the member has made a good point. Indeed, I have made that same point to bus providers, about what seems to be a disproportionate impact. They would argue that, in the space that they are in, with the shortage of drivers, their focus is on getting the maximum number of people to where they need to go. However, as the representative of a rural area, I have sympathy with the member’s argument.
The extra funding that we have provided fills the gap between the costs of running services and severely reduced ticket income due to suppressed demand, but I point out that operators who receive that additional funding are not allowed to make a profit under the terms of their public service contracts with the Scottish Government. Any profit before tax that is made on Scottish local bus operations is recovered from participating operators.
The largest bus operators are now running, on average, 85 per cent of their pre-Covid mileage. In some places, operators are running below 100 per cent of pre-Covid mileage due to a lack of drivers because of sickness, self-isolation or national driver shortages. When I talked to a major operator earlier this week, I was struck by its concerns. As is happening across society, it might plan services the evening before, on the basis of expected capacity, but—lo and behold!—it discovers, first thing in the morning, that more drivers are off and much reshuffling has to be done. It is, of course, difficult to communicate those service changes to service users, but I think that the operators need to get better at doing so.
With current driver shortages, bus operators have to make difficult decisions on where best to deploy capacity to meet demand and to maintain basic connectivity, but they have to do so in consultation with local transport authorities. It is right that decisions about local bus service provision be determined locally and after consultation. That is why it is a condition of our funding that bus operators are required to consult and co-operate with local transport authorities when planning services. Operators must respond positively and quickly to reasonable requests from local transport authorities to amend provision and keep services under review.