(18 Nov 2021, 8:41 am)54APhotography wrote Perhaps the time has come to end the free bus pass. Bring back the concession fares, if £7.5m is to be cut from that budget, then it must be on the cards. The other £4.1m would also appear to revolve around the off peak=, predominantly free pass occupied services..

Pretty sure any political party/La agreeing to this, would see their share of the vote fall next time there was any sort of vote.

My proposal is a little more radical and would see the end to Nexus subsidising these bus routes, the constant threat of withdrawals coming to an end (with Nexus, DCC or NCC being placed over a barrel by the operators) , passengers seeing the end to multiple operators running a route - depending on the time of day) and ticketing anomalies reducing etc. 

It involves the operators running services commercially. 
It involves operators not picking and choosing the runs they see the money in and not bothering with the ones they don't see money in. 
It means the end of bolting on a failing service on to a subsided service (see the 71) and still apparently failing to make it work commercially.

If the twirly passes were cancelled, I wonder what that would do to operator revenues?
Assuming they only receive the concession fare and aren't given any other rebate to cover the balance of the actual fare.

These operators can afford to pay out a dividend, give out staff shares and hefty salaries for those at the top of the pile, but they can't afford to run a service that doesn't tick a couple of commercial boxes.
Passengers shouldn't be the ones to lose out here (either by inconvenience of a route being cancelled, ran by a different operator or by paying a token fare).