00:00 How was your ride on the Robin this morning, Mark?
00:01 - It was really good.
00:02 Look, the best way of judging these things
00:03 is what do the regular users think.
00:05 And we had four people on the bus who are regular users,
00:08 or five actually, who are regular users,
00:10 and they all spoke incredibly highly of it.
00:12 They use it for different reasons,
00:13 for getting to work, to run a business,
00:15 getting one of them takes their daughter to school,
00:18 the other one uses it for a range of things,
00:20 and one just uses it a lot for getting out and about,
00:22 seeing the area, seeing their friends.
00:24 All of them spoke very highly of it.
00:26 Easy to book, easy to use, cost-effective,
00:29 and delivers a bus service
00:30 where there wouldn't otherwise be one.
00:32 - As Secretary of State for Transport,
00:34 how good is it to see DFT investment
00:37 being used in this way in your own constituency?
00:39 - Well, look, this was delivered
00:41 before I was Secretary of State,
00:42 so it was a pilot scheme that started last October.
00:46 But it's really good.
00:46 For us, it's a really good learning
00:48 for how these things work.
00:50 But the proof of the pudding, actually,
00:51 is the fact that this has been so successful
00:54 that the County Council is taking the bus money
00:57 that it gets to support bus services from my department,
01:00 and it's already decided,
01:01 this only having been running a year,
01:03 that it's gonna use its own money
01:05 to support this expanding in the north of the constituency,
01:09 in the Newont area,
01:10 but also to roll it out elsewhere in the county,
01:13 in rural areas where people need those bus services.
01:15 So actually, I think it's already proved itself.
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