Environment Minister Leo Brincat must have regretted standing in for Transport Minister Joe Mizzi this evening in parliament when he gave a 15 minute reply to a parliamentary question put by opposition MP Toni Bezzina.

After wading through a reply typical of Mr Mizzi, the opposition benches asked him to give a clear answer as to how much Autobus de Leon would be getting in subsidies for 2015 and 2016 respectively.

Incidentally, it was MP Censu Galea who was making the question on behalf of Mr Bezzina. In his reply, Mr Mizzi wrote that it was not true that Autobus de Leon were asking for more subsidies and that the insinuation was made up by PN party media.

On his behalf, Mr Brincat said: "The PN simply wants to confuse people. We will table the agreement and it will take less than the 11 months it took to table the report on Arriva, and even then, there were pieces missing."

He continued to say that the government will not repeat the mistakes that the PN had made with Arriva, which had asked for a €50m subsidy, while AB Leon asked for €29m. "We saved jobs and offered a better service than the one we found in place. We carried more passengers and sold more tickets and carried out more maintenance," Mr Brincat told the house. He also read out Mr Mizzi's reply which alleged that the PN simply wanted to put a spanner in the works and constantly tried to undermine the government's work.

He also said that on the last night of operation, Arriva was asking for €5 per ticket, and that the PN had allowed this to be written into the contract.

At this point, Opposition deputy leader Mario de Marco interjected and made a point of order saying that in PQs, no insinuations, opinions or charges or irony could be used. Speaker Anglu Farrugia gave a ruling on the spot and said that while this held true for the question, numerous rulings in parliament had established that the House could not curtail the length of an answer or its content.

Dr De Marco countered: "It's not about the length, it's about the content."But the speaker handed the floor back to Mr Brincat, who said he would not repeat what he had already said in order to save time, but a moment of hilarity ensued when he did in fact repeat a couple of paragraphs by mistake.

The answer went on and on, and interesting bits and pieces of information emerged, such as the fact that 32 new low floor buses had been ordered, with more to come and that new guidelines will be issued on mobility scooters and motorised wheelchairs, but it was mostly a monologue about how bad Arriva was and how good the new service has become.

When Mr Brincat finished, Censu Galea asked  that after the "Guinness World Record reply", could the Minister actually tell the House what the subsidies are. Mr Brincat, who dealt with the issue quite well, said that from all that was said in the reply, Autobus de Leon was to get €23m in subsidies this year and €29 next year. Asked why this was, he said he assumed that this was because Autobus de Leon had not yet started to operate some of the routes asked for by the government and that this year's subsidy was on a pro-rata basis.