Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr Martin): I welcome Peter Rice, Leona Lees and John Conville from the Department.

I seek Committee agreement that this evidence should be recorded by Hansard.

The Chairperson (Mr Martin): You can make a brief opening statement of up to 10 minutes, and then you can expect some questions from the Committee. We are in your hands.

Mr Peter Rice (Department for Infrastructure): Thank you for inviting us again, Chair. We were here last year, but the Committee membership has changed, so I will give a potted history of community transport, and then I will give a bit more detail on where we are in the phase 2 review.

Community transport fills a gap between what public transport and private operators provide. It has grown organically and evolved over the years into the system that we have today. The current system has been in place since 2013 without many changes. Community transport is relatively small in the grand scheme of public transport. I will try to elaborate on that. Main public transport is Translink, which works through its various mechanisms. The Department funds community transport, which is primarily Dial-a-Lift, which provides accessibility in the rural environment, and then there is the Disability Action Transport Scheme (DATS), which is geared towards providing access for people with disabilities or who cannot use public transport.

Outside that, there is the health sector, education sector and other elements of community transport. To put it into perspective, Translink has around 1,400 vehicles. The education sector has 700 or 800 buses. There are around 7,500 taxis registered in Northern Ireland, and community transport has access to 75 vehicles. That is the scale of the services that it provides.

I will now try and show how the Department funds those various community transport sectors. The rural transport fund (RTF), through Dial-a-Lift, is funding accessibility in the rural environment. That is delivered by the 11 rural transport community partnerships (RTCPs). In the urban environment, there is the transport programme for people with disabilities, and that funds DATS. That is delivered by two companies, Bridge Accessible Transport and Disability Action, but it is also delivered by the 11 RTCPs as well.

The community transport review was launched by Minister O'Dowd in 2023. It was to look at the role of community transport in the wider public sector environment and also to look at ensuring that the Department gets value for money in the delivery of services through that sector.

The phase 1 report was completed earlier this year, and it was shared with stakeholders and the Committee in, I think, March. That phase 1 report set the building blocks for this review, phase 2. It primarily looked at data collection, doing a lot of questionnaires, surveys of the sector and the users of it to get a better understanding of how they use the service and the service that is provided.

In the phase 2 review, the team, John and Leona, took forward the review, and it started earlier this year. We briefed the Committee back in the springtime. That review looks at a number of elements, including the policy environment for the community transport sector. It is also looking at the performance of the sector through the two groups that I was talking about, both their financial performance and their outputs and deliverables. Following on from that, we look at the service delivery model, the most appropriate model that we should use for Northern Ireland, and we then ask how we should fund that idealised service delivery model.

Over the last nine months, the team has engaged with the various stakeholders, working closely with the Community Transport Association (CTA) and the 13 providers that I talked about earlier, and collecting the data. We have not yet completed the phase 2 review, but some of the issues that we have identified and challenges that we have encountered are the results of the policy environment in which they operate. I mentioned Dial-a-Lift and DATS. The policy that performs that has been in place since 2013.

Also coming out of the review is the complexity of what we have. Some of the earlier slides showed that we have two separate schemes for urban and rural, different providers, the majority of whom provide for both schemes, using the same resources, buses and staff. Therefore, there are complexities around it.

There are also complexities in the data. We are trying to allocate funding to two different schemes that are provided by the same provider. How do we delegate those resources? How are resources appropriately distributed across the two schemes? How is that recorded? In the analysis, there is an issue of data quality. Also, we are looking into the complexities of trying to compare Dial-a-Lift and DATS.

Another issue that came out was, obviously, funding, which over the last number of years has remained relatively static. We also had COVID, which had an impact on funding for the schemes and also their deliverability. It also influenced the volume of data that we had against that.

We looked at finance and performance. We ran through that and looked at the information from the various suppliers. Skipping on, this slide shows a number of issues that have come out. As I mentioned, funding for the schemes has been relatively static until this year, and then there was a 25% increase across the board for the two schemes. There are 7,000 active members between the two programmes. Membership has been declining in the last couple of years, and that is linked to the availability of funding. The two programmes are providing around quarter of a million trips. That number has remained relatively static between the two schemes. In comparison, Translink is looking at 65 million-plus passenger journeys. We are not quite comparing like with like, but the scale shows where community transport sits within wider public transport.

In the make-up of the trips, some are one-to-one trips, as regards the driver:passenger ratio, and others are one to many. In the rural environment and Dial-a-Lift, a majority are one to many, which indicates that the buses are being used more efficiently because you have more people using that bus at once, whereas with DATS, it is the reverse, and there are more one-to-one trips. That probably reflects the circumstances of the individual users using that service. That is just some of the information that we are gathering.

For the service delivery model, we have looked at other jurisdictions, primarily in Great Britain and the South of Ireland. They are all using three main types of service delivery. One is that government directly delivers the service, the other is that it procures that service via a third party through a procurement contract or by providing a grant to some sort of social enterprise. The latter is what we currently have in Northern Ireland. Those types of models are generally in use across the various regions in some form, and some of them are hybrid. What comes out of the review at the moment is that there is no silver bullet: we are not seeing a service delivery model that would be a good replacement that we could just drop into Northern Ireland to do the job. However, it shows that the service delivery model that Northern Ireland has at the minute is aligned with those in other jurisdictions.

I will now turn to some of the other issues and emerging themes, the first of which is operational performance. As I mentioned earlier, there are 13 different providers over two schemes. Not all of those providers are offering the same service in the same way. As you might expect, there are differences in performance because there is variety in cost per trip, the number of registered users and the number of trips taken. There are legitimate reasons for variations, but that gives us an opportunity to establish best practice that could be used in other areas to drive efficiency or improve output.

When it comes to management, as I reflected earlier, one of the issues is the fact that we have two schemes, with the majority of providers offering both schemes. That adds a complication in how that is managed. We think that there is an opportunity to address that and potentially streamline either the schemes or their management.

We have identified legislative constraints, and I am sure that the Committee has heard previously about the 10B licence. Work is being undertaken to review that, and there is a view in the Department that that is fairly well advanced. I imagine that officials will be coming to the Committee in the near future to discuss that. We are not leading on that, but we are aware of it, and we will reflect the outcomes of that review in the final version of our report.

We hear from stakeholders about operational delivery constraints. Some of that is around flexibility and geographical location, as well as funding constraints and our terms and conditions around grants. Those have been flagged up to the review team, and we will need to address that.

There will always be funding constraints, irrespective of the budget. That was probably reflected in recent years when the funding remained relatively static. We were aware that that was causing real deliverability issues for stakeholders. This year, because of the increase in funding, I would not say that it has been alleviated, but it has definitely gone a long way towards improving the ability of community transport providers to deliver services. It is not quite the case that a 25% increase in funding delivers a 25% increase in outputs. We are conscious that that 25% increase would have had to cover increased service delivery costs, but it will go towards improving service delivery.

Those are the factors that are being flagged up to the review team. We are not yet in a position to conclude phase 2. We are on track to have a draft of the phase 2 report ready by Christmas that we will be able to share with stakeholders, including this Committee. That will give stakeholders an opportunity to feed back on what we have encountered and our views on some of that. We hope to get that back in January, and that will enable us to consider it with the intention of producing a final report towards the end of February onwards. I apologise for rushing through all of that, but that is a quick history of the current review of community transport. We are happy to take questions.

The Chairperson (Mr Martin): Thank you very much, Peter. That was very interesting, especially for someone like me, who is coming to this very fresh and, perhaps, without the knowledge that other Committee members got from your presentation earlier in the year. I want to pick up on a couple of general things. Work stream 2 is to do with the identification of alternative operational delivery options for the community transport service. You have outlined some of the ways in which that is currently delivered. You also mentioned how — I would not call it best practice — other areas such as the South and the rest of the UK do this. Have you identified any other delivery options yet and any associated cost benefits?

Mr Rice: I will answer the question and then I will ask John and Leona to provide some detail. The three models that I referred to earlier are direct government provision, a contract, or some sort of grant. Those are the three main mechanisms that we have encountered. As I mentioned in our presentation, we have not identified an option that is much better than others. There is a theme coming through the review, which is that the service needs to be tailored to the local environment and that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Our thinking is that we are unlikely to go to a regional solution. The solution that we are looking for still has to reflect local needs in each area. As for the other jurisdictions, the three types of service delivery model that I mentioned go towards a hybrid. It is not a pure, "We will deliver this through government funding" or "We will deliver this through social enterprise". They are using a hybrid mix, and that is probably the direction of travel.

Before I put my foot in it, I will pass over to Leona in case there is anything else.

Ms Leona Lees (Department for Infrastructure): On the cost-benefit analysis of the different service delivery options, we have not had the time or the capacity in this review to do a deep dive. We looked at the options and made a high-level assessment of the options to say, "These are the bits that we like". If you were wanting to change anything, the next stage would probably be a deeper dive on the cost-benefit analysis. The work that we are doing on the finance and performance would inform that cost-benefit analysis because that has helped us to get to a point where we now have a better understanding of how much it costs to deliver the services that we already have. If you wanted to grow the community transport sector and introduce different services beyond what we have, we have a better idea now of what that might cost. We can say roughly that to have just one bus on the road for a year costs about £40,000, and we did not have that understanding before. It is all just building a picture for us.

The Chairperson (Mr Martin): You mentioned the hybrid model. I guess that if you were looking at how to deliver community transport through a tender process, you would probably be looking at a couple of quantifiables, for example, cost and quality. How much it would cost and what quality it would provide. Do you look at community transport in terms of trying to get the best value for money or do you look at other, slightly-less-tangible benefits? Also, how would you decide what the quantifiables would be?

Mr Rice: I think that that is the direction of travel. We are not in the position to say, "This is the service delivery model that we would recommend, and these are the criteria that would accompany that". Irrespective of whether you go for a grant system or a procurement system, you want to be clear about your expectations of the outputs. That would be the inputs, how much funding you are prepared to put into it, and therefore what your expectations are coming out of that.

As to where you value the outputs and balance decision, do you want a system that has a one-to-many passenger:driver ratio or are you looking at a case of one-to-one journeys? I suspect that the answer is somewhere in between. What we are trying to provide at this stage is accessibility in a rural environment, and in an urban environment accessibility for people with disabilities or who cannot use public transport. Is there a solution that provides for both? That is why you will end up with a hybrid. How do you address both those needs? There will need to be a judgement call at some point on what the criteria would be. Do you put all the emphasis on accessibility or on efficiency, or do you land somewhere in the middle? I suspect that it will be in the middle.

The Chairperson (Mr Martin): It sounds as though we have a hybrid model, we are doing a review, and we will, maybe, just keep that hybrid model. Do you sense that that is where you are going? I appreciate the review and the detail in it. It sounds as though we have that hybrid model between DAL and DATS, if I have my acronyms right. One of those goes quite far, and one is nearer with regard to journey time. One tends to me more of a one-to-one service and one tends to be a one-to-many service, which I think was the terminology that you used. We have that kind of hybrid model already. We are going to do a review and just keep things the way they are because we have a hybrid model. Is that a fair assumption?

Mr Rice: I do not want to prejudge the review. We are working our way through it; there is a due process to go through. The current system has been in place since 2013. If there were a eureka moment of, "You know what? We should replace x with y", officials and stakeholders would have identified it before now. On your summary of the direction of travel, we are probably heading in that direction, but we need to go through the process.

Ms Lees: The service delivery model is quite a high-level conceptual framework of how the services operate, but there is a lot of scope underneath that as regards how you configure the services and what particular services you have. A lot of changes or improvements could be made to the way things happen. It is not a case where we will probably turn round at the end and say, "Oh, everything's fine" and move on. There is a lot of scope within that to do things differently.

The Chairperson (Mr Martin): There could be tinkering: that is what you are describing, Leona. There is a high-level review, but things could be moved around at a slightly lower level to produce better outcomes.

Ms Lees: Yes, absolutely. For example, at the moment, for Dial-a-Lift and DATS, the majority of trips are delivered by 16-seater minibuses. Most of the rural providers have some element of social car schemes that they use to supplement that, which helps keep trip times down and to manage the ratio as regards more one-to-many trips. There are things you could do to make more single vehicles accessible in order to tackle the issue in a different way and make the service work better.

The Chairperson (Mr Martin): It is better for the environment as well, I imagine, if you are running a car rather than a minibus. That is fine. Thank you very much, guys.

Mr Stewart: Thanks, folks, for coming along again. I appreciate the latest update and that the review is a work in progress. I want to take a moment to praise all of our community transport teams. You know, as much as I do, about the amazing work that they do. In my area, we have the South Antrim Community Transport team, which does a wonderful job. It is fair to say that many of those organisations are running on borrowed faith when it comes to getting the necessary funding and support. I know that that is part of the review that you are doing, but it would be remiss of me not to praise them.

One of the slides talked about the operational delivery constraints and the funding constraints that particularly affect some of the providers. Funding has been an issue for a long time. Will you talk a bit more about the operational delivery constraints? I assume that it is about access to volunteers, dwindling numbers of volunteers, ageing fleets, the difficulty in getting on the road and all that goes with it. From your engagement with those providers, how vulnerable do you sense they are?

Mr Rice: When we were here in the spring, the issue of vulnerability was mentioned. I will stand corrected by John or Leona, but I do not think that the vulnerability of those organisations is about their continuing to be a going concern that provides the service. I recognise that there was a genuine concern about costs going up and funding not keeping pace. This year's allocation from the Minister went a long way to address that. A large quantum of the requests from community transport providers was facilitated and provided for as part of the budget allocation. I do not think there is an issue with regard to their continuation. Hopefully, my colleagues will support that view.

On the operational difficulties, as Leona pointed out, some of the terms and conditions of providing the grant funding to the providers seem to be an issue. If the terms and conditions are causing an issue operationally, we might need to look at them. There are also issues around flexibility. Each of the providers operates within a geographical location, but there are pressures and needs whereby they sometimes have to go outside those geographical locations, but not for a region-wide service. You are then looking at whether it is possible to provide some flexibility in order to try to address some of the operational issues. I think that they are probably the two main ones.

Leona or John, do you want to come in on that?

Ms Lees: John mentioned most of the ones that I would have mentioned. We have been discussing those things with the providers. On some issues, there are obvious things that we can do, because it is within our gift to make the changes. Others are more difficult to tackle. One of the constraints that providers mention frequently is the ability to recruit and retain staff, drivers in particular, because they are competing with the private sector and other parts of the public sector that can offer more attractive pay and conditions. They can offer providers a long-term contract, pensions and all the rest, whereas, in community transport, staff tend to work for the minimum wage. There is no easy, short-term fix for those things. We are trying to identify the barriers that we can do something about and make those changes. Some of them are legislative, and some of them are linked to the 10B review that Peter mentioned. That review has identified ways in which some of those barriers can be tackled. I do not want to pre-empt that.

Mr Stewart: OK. That is the point that I was getting to. Peter, I agree with you: the vulnerability is not about their continuing as a going concern. I know that those organisations are dedicated to providing a provision at any level they can. The vulnerability is around capacity and, particularly, the need to get more volunteers. It is about getting and keeping drivers; the conditions that they have to work in; and all of that. As we try to extend the remit and role of those community groups and providers, how do we make sure that they will be there when we need them to step up again? I think about transforming healthcare and how those groups will play a vital role in providing transport to health facilities around the country. It is essential that we make sure that they have the capacity to provide that when we need them to step up. Given the limited powers that we have, how is that being done?

Mr Rice: A lot of the Dial-a-Lift service is about providing local access, including to health facilities such as dentists and GPs. That is done in a local area, and, again, the intention is that the review looks at transport in a local area, not regionally. We need to be careful about thinking that community transport could gear up to provide access to hospitals and other facilities across the region. That is in the domain of the Department of Health, and DOH has a mechanism for providing it. That service can definitely be provided at a local level. However, I will give the example of transport to hospitals. If you were to decide that you wanted to expand the service to give it the capacity to go to the various acute hospitals, that would mean you were tying up a bus for a much longer journey and much longer period. Potentially, that bus would be sitting at the other end, waiting on the patient coming out, before it comes back again. If a bus is used in that way and is away for that length of time, it cannot provide a service in its local area that would give more people more access. In pushing the service-delivery model, we need to be careful that we continue to focus on the local service rather than on making it a regional service.

Is there anything else on that?

Mr John Conville (Department for Infrastructure): The main points have been covered. The number of volunteers has taken a bit of a hit since COVID.

Mr Stewart: Yes. That is the case everywhere, across all organisations.

Mr Conville: Yes. There is probably a higher dependency on recruitment across the board here. Boundaries come into it too. A bit of flexibility is needed as regards distinct boundaries, where the bus turns and comes back again. From my experience, local is good, but it also presents a challenge in that is quite restrictive in what it does. The positives for the members are that there are regular drivers and there is confidence and security in the services that are being provided. As Peter said, once you start taking resources out of a particular area, you pressurise your existing services.

Mr Stewart: That is good to know. My final point goes back to the point that you made, Peter, about Health having a role. In this review, what engagement have you had with the Department of Health on how it sees the role of community transport and wants to expand it? I know that the Health Minister has said that he sees a key role for it. In that system, your Department, the Health Department and the network have to work hand in glove.

Mr Rice: Yes, that sits alongside this review. There is a cross-departmental working group comprising our Department, the Department of Health and DAERA around how we can best utilise community transport resources to help both DAERA and DOH deliver their services. That working group has been going on for a while. It has improved communication and relationships and given us a better understanding of the environment that the various Departments work in. There has been a bit of a re-emphasis from the relevant Ministers in that they want to see slightly more output from that working group in terms of the tangible benefits that it could lead to. That work is ongoing. Leona sits on the working group. We are pushing DOH colleagues to understand what their need is. It then comes back to thinking about how community transport can potentially meet some of that. I do not think that community transport could meet all of the need given the scale of the health service, but there could be a role for it. This has been talked about for a number years. I will go back to this phrase: if there were an easy solution, it would have been implemented a long time ago.

Mr Stewart: Of course, yes. I appreciate that.

Mr Rice: It is a very challenging environment, but we have taken on board the political support for us to get on and identify pragmatic arrangements, and we are progressing that.

Mr Stewart: OK. That working group works simultaneously with the work streams that you are carrying out. Are there any notional ideas on when that group might conclude the work and report back on what can and cannot be done?

Mr Rice: We do not have a timetable at this minute in time, but we can come back to you.

Mr Stewart: That would be useful. Thank you.

Mr Harvey: Thank you very much. I am looking at some figures: 75 vehicles. What are your staff numbers? Do you have a rough breakdown of your staff and driver numbers?

Ms Lees: I think that the total number of staff is just over 100 or 120 — something like that. It is not a huge number. I cannot remember off the top of my head, but we have the figures all broken down by the different organisations.

Mr Rice: We can come back to you on that.

Ms Lees: It is not a huge number.

Mr Harvey: Does that number include drivers?

Ms Lees: That includes drivers, yes.

Mr Harvey: It is amazing what you do with those numbers. Of those staff, how many are voluntary?

Ms Lees: There are fewer voluntary drivers. There are not that many. If each organisation had maybe one voluntary driver, that would be it. That is because of the licensing requirements; you have to have certain standards. The volunteer drivers are more on the social car side. The social car volunteers use their own car to take people to and fro, but that relies on volunteers, and, as John mentioned, there has been a struggle to get volunteers in the past few years. I know that the organisations talk a lot with each other. Somebody might contact one in the neighbouring area to volunteer, and they sort of manage that between themselves. Some do not use any volunteer cars at all, but others have quite a big network that they have built up over years.

Mr Harvey: Very good. Disability Action does not have a high number of vehicles. It has just one or two vehicles.

Ms Lees: No, it has —. John, do you know?

Mr Conville: Disability Action has eight or 10, or something like that, for direct delivery within the Belfast and greater Belfast area.

Mr Harvey: Is it just greater Belfast?

Ms Lees: Bridge Accessible Transport in Derry has similar.

Mr Conville: Yes, it has something similar, I imagine.

Mr Harvey: I appreciate that. I know that it is a lifeline for some people. Where I am from, Down Community Transport is a huge success and a huge lifeline for so many people. Thank you very much.

Mr McHugh: Is deas bualadh libh.

I have never met you before. This is my first time at this Committee. I live in a rural area: Castlederg in west Tyrone. The communities in the surrounding areas depend very much on the work of Easilink in Strabane. Are there particular difficulties that you perceive as being peculiar to border regions?

Mr Rice: I am going to say no, but I am not too sure.

Ms Lees: In Fermanagh and Tyrone generally, there are considerations about rurality and distance. The buses have extra distance to cover to get people to the nearest town to do whatever they are going there to do. That provides a little bit of extra challenge in managing and delivering that and trying to keep your costs under control. In the analysis, we have seen that Easilink in Fermanagh very much tries to manage its mileage through use of social cars. It tries to use social cars to pick up the person who is an outlier and keep the bus within a relatively compact area, so that the bus travels fewer miles. Easilink in Fermanagh does it that way to keep costs down and things like that. We have challenges just because of the geography. The cross-border element always comes up in the areas that border the Republic. Providers are kind of restricted in that they cannot go across the border into another jurisdiction because licensing, insurance and different things mean that it is not that easy to operate. We get queries about that at times. We have not specifically looked at it in this review, but I know that it is an issue.

Mr McHugh: I was alluding to that fact. I am very aware of the difficulty that people have had in travelling cross-border. They have had to do a whole detour, because they were not allowed to cross the border. To what extent has consideration been given to addressing that issue and to working in cooperation with agencies on the other side of the border to deliver services?

Ms Lees: We have not specifically looked at that in the review, but it has been flagged up as an issue. We will try to acknowledge it in the review and make suggestions about what might be done to investigate that further. The 10B review makes reference to how the licensing aspect could be facilitated. We will wait on its feedback. That may identify opportunities where we can get round those technical legislative barriers. That would probably be the first step towards doing something operationally.

Mr McHugh: Apart from it being a feature in rural areas, interestingly enough, there was a situation in Derry, in the city itself, which is right on the border, when traffic was being detoured, perhaps as a result of a traffic accident. A bus was not able to follow the detour route into the Republic and out again, and that imposed an additional journey of nearly 15 miles on those people. Going from Castlederg, where I live, to Strabane every day, I cross the border about three times, in and out. It is a feature. Easilink delivers a good service in our community. We want to see it being supported in every way possible to ensure that it can maintain the type of service that it offers. There is also that hybrid-type service that you mentioned.

Mr McMurray: A lot of topics have been covered, not least in the good words for Down Community Transport, which I echo.

You touched a couple of times on D1 licensing and the legislative constraints. Are there other areas of legislation that might need to be tweaked as we come down the river, or is it just the licensing?

Mr Rice: That is the primary one.

Ms Lees: Those are the two main ones. The other one is the taxi operator licence regulations. Currently, if any of the community transport operators wanted to buy a smaller car, such as an eight-seater car that is wheelchair-accessible, they would potentially need a taxi operator licence and a taxi driver licence for the driver. The team that is working on the 10B permit review has picked that up and will address it. I do not want to pre-empt what that review will say, but the team has looked at that issue and has a couple of options on it: an administrative one and maybe a legislative one.

Mr McMurray: So, legislative implications or themes will be coming down the river.

Ms Lees: Yes. There are some things on which the team thinks that the Department can issue updated guidance, while other things may require legislative changes to be made, none of which is unachievable. Those are the three main areas of legislation that have some impact on service delivery and the services that the existing operators can deliver.

Mr McMurray: OK. Thank you.

Mr McNulty: Thanks, Peter, Leona and John. Where would we be as a society without community transport?

Ms Lees: Where would we be?

Mr Rice: Sorry. I thought that that was a statement rather than a question. [Laughter.]

That is a good point. I mentioned in the presentation that community transport is a relatively small element of wider public transport. In the grand scheme of things, it is relatively small, but, for the individuals, it is very important. That is recognised through the Committee's interest in it and the amount of interest that we get from various stakeholders. Community transport plays a vital role for the individuals who are able to access it. I should have said earlier that the schemes are member-only schemes and are not open to the public. You have to be a member of the scheme, which is, perhaps, reflected in the relatively small numbers. Community transport provides a unique and vital service for the 7,000 active members.

Ms Lees: The Community Transport Association, which oversees community transport organisations across the UK, has been working for a number of years on what is called a social value index. It recently shared its latest figures with us. It collects a lot of metrics across the board and uses those to estimate the value that every pound of funding that is put into community transport brings for the wider economy and as regards social value in an area. The figures for 2023-24 showed that, for every pound of funding that goes into the community transport sector here, something like £2·55 of value is added to the local social sector. The value is more than double. In that year, £4·3 million of funding was put into the sector, and the value to the local Northern Ireland economy was estimated as being £12·5 million or something like that.

There might be a small number of people involved, but helping them to get out and about and live their lives and do the things that we all take for granted has a big impact on local businesses and shops and on those people's lives — it connects people. The clue is in the title of community transport: it is a community service. You just have to go out on one of the buses to see that it is about more than numbers on a spreadsheet. When I first joined, I went out on one of the buses in my local area, and, within half an hour, I met somebody who I was related to and found out that the manager of the company is married to my mother's cousin. It is all about community and connecting people; it is about more than just money. We are very mindful of that in the review. We must not get our heads stuck in a spreadsheet and forget about the wider picture.

Mr McNulty: To a small degree, we are all guilty of bashing everything, but you deserve enormous credit. Rural and community transport operators deserve enormous credit. It produces a 155% return on the investment, which is incredibly positive. As Harry pointed out, it is such an important lifeline for so many individuals, families and communities. I have seen that when I have met those organisations. They are very proud of the service that they provide. They recognise its importance and value, and long may it continue. What are the biggest challenges facing community and rural transport ?

Ms Lees: We have talked a lot about funding: that is always, and will remain, the biggest challenge. In nearly every year of the 10 years that we have looked at, the organisations have received an annual budget from the Civil Service. We all know the difficulties that annual budgets create. That has constrained the organisations' ability to develop and grow, because they are living hand to mouth from one year to the next. Funding is their single biggest obstacle. In turn, that creates other problems. We have mentioned the problems in recruiting and retaining staff: we cannot run the service without the staff. The lack of capital funding, in particular, will start to have an impact if we do not do something about it. At some point, the vehicle fleets will reach an age when they have to be replaced. You cannot keep repairing a 10- or 12-year-old bus to keep it on the road, because, at some point, that will not be cost-effective any longer. Those are the two biggest challenges.

Mr Conville: We need to ensure that, as currently structured, the two schemes are meeting the needs of the people who really need the services. Staff recruitment and retention of fully trained staff are important. Once people acquire their driver certificate of professional competence (DCPC), their world becomes a bit bigger. It is about recruiting good staff. When I talk to the managers, they tell me that their staff are brilliant and are very loyal to their employers. It is a challenging financial environment all round. Vehicle retention is another, longer-term challenge.

Mr McNulty: To what degree should community and rural transport be considered as a vital part of the health service?

Mr Rice: As I mentioned in a previous answer, DOH is responsible for the delivery of health services. Community transport is focused on, as Leona said, the community and local areas. Community transport does currently provide access to local health facilities, and there is nothing in the review to say that that will change. As John said, the review is looking at how we ensure that the schemes will target the areas that we talked about: accessibility to local services or access to transport for people who cannot access public transport. Community transport already is a key element of enabling people in rural areas to access their local services, including health services.

Mr McNulty: OK. Well done, folks, and keep going. Thanks very much.

The Chairperson (Mr Martin): I thank John, Peter and Leona for coming. I think that we have covered everything that the Committee wanted to. All the best for the rest of your day. Thank you very much.