(24 Feb 2022, 10:32 pm)Adrian wrote Most deregulated markets have been operating in managed decline for the best part of 25 years. Happy enough to run anything profitable and to send that money straight back to investors. Any accountant can make most things either profitable or loss-making on a balance sheet, and it doesn't help that bus services are always looked at parochially. Anything that is a bit tight, even if its the odd trip, is quickly shoved in the local authorities' direction to sort out. Usually ending up in the situation that the tax payer then funds their business, if not farmed out to another operator. It doesn't increase the operators profits, it just decreases the overhead and cuts more customers off from their bus network.These are the key issues. Under the current model operators are far too easily able to carve up services to cream off the profitable bits, into the pockets of shareholders and abandon both the bits that are less well used, and the people reliant on those. Local government then has to try to make a fixed pool of public money, not shored up by profits that the fat cat investors have creamed off in the PLC, spread to cover an ever expanded wasteland of abandoned routes. In turn this increases the profits for private operator, often those same operators who weren't interested in running the service without a load of public subsidy but are happy to cream off anything they can get from the public they "serve". At least under public ownership, the public purse would get the benefit of the most profitable runs, to more effectively maintain the network as a whole.
RE: Nexus Tenders | Newcastle & North Tyneside - March 2022