(28 Jan 2025, 10:16 pm)Andreos1 wrote The money being spent on subsidised services is absolutely scandalous. 
It really rams home the state of the network and how those who supposedly have all that knowledge within the bus industry over the years... Well... Maybe they didn't after all. 

Mind, NECA have wasted a fair chunk of BSIP too mind, as discussed on the forum in the recent past.

There's something particularly scandalous about Go North East succeeding in misappropriating BSIP funding for high frequency services for which they then manage to fail to meet PVR - for reasons ranging from having overstretched their commitment to Metro Replacement work to "extreme temperatures" - and recording profits in the £millions in the latest accounts while remunerating best part of £1 million at director-level and funnelling undetermined (and if published, I dare say fudged) amounts into the coffers of expensive day-rate consultants hanging onto the gravy train. It's like watching a beached whale die. 

I'd argue it's really NECA's fault for signing BSIP funding away to them, with insufficient scrutiny and consultation, for moronic improvements which do nothing in the way of supporting lifeline services - that largely forgotten thing BSIP was introduced in the spirit of. But then, these are the same people who, under the previous guise of TNE, celebrated being awarded just £163.5 million of the £804 million they had sought in their initial bid for BSIP funding. With the fullness of time, it looks like a decent chunk of that has been pissed away into the wind. Ostensibly, a failed organisation all round.

Between both the public and private sector, I can't help but feel reminded of the pigs in Animal Farm.