00:00 How was your ride on the Robin this morning Mark?
00:02 It was really good.
00:03 Look, the best way of judging these things is what do the regular users think.
00:06 And we had four people on the bus who are regular users, or five actually, who are regular
00:10 users and they all spoke incredibly highly of it.
00:12 They use it for different reasons, for getting to work, to run a business, one of them takes
00:17 their daughter to school, the other one uses it for a range of things and one just uses
00:21 a lot for getting out and about, seeing the area, seeing their friends.
00:25 All of them spoke very highly of it, easy to book, easy to use, cost effective and delivers
00:30 a bus service where there wouldn't otherwise be one.
00:33 Yeah, okay.
00:34 How good, as Secretary of State for Transport, how good is it to see DFT investment being
00:40 used in this way in your own constituency?
00:42 Well look, this was delivered before I was Secretary of State, so it was a pilot scheme
00:46 that started last October.
00:48 But it's really good.
00:49 For us, it's a really good learning for how these things work.
00:53 The proof of the pudding actually is the fact that this has been so successful that the
00:57 County Council is taking the bus money that it gets to support bus services from my department
01:03 and it's already decided, this only having been running a year, that it's going to use
01:07 its own money to support this expanding in the north of the constituency, in the New
01:12 Interior, but also to roll it out elsewhere in the county, in rural areas where people
01:17 need those bus services.
01:18 So actually, I think it's already proved itself.
01:19 It's a pretty cool sound.
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