We will agree to disagree on the other points - just going around in circles.

With regard to Fencehouses. Nobody likes changing buses, nobody likes hanging around the poor 'interchanges' at Houghton, Chester or indeed the Galleries and Concord.
Nobody likes seeing fares increased massively either.
However, taking 3 double deckers off an hour and replacing them all with 13 single deckers in each direction per hour, forcing them to change buses along with the location of the village in relation to the buzzfare and county boundaries only tells me one thing... And it has more to do with increasing buzzfare ticket sales than it does anything else.

Washington is the same. Several services that worked through the villages of Washington going to Newcastle, Sunderland or beyond have been cancelled, with replacements all feeding into the Galleries or Concord.

Wonder if they would have done that if there was competition in those areas?