Minister Austin Gatt was not due to close the conference, but did so, saying he felt the obligation to do so to give answers to those who had voiced their concerns.

“We understand the difficulties you face. Your conditions are not decent and that will be a cornerstone of reform, but this must be done while keeping in mind that at the end of the day, the customer must come first,” said Dr Gatt.

He said that he agreed that there needed to be more termini and more bus lanes. “We all want to see more passengers on public transport. It is how we get there that is the issue in contention,” he said.

He said that bus owners and drivers needed to get rid of their “closed box” mentality. “A fare adjustment is needed, but it will not be e5 per trip as some are saying. This will have to go hand in hand with prepaid, loyalty and value packages,” said Dr Gatt.

Dr Gatt said that for the while, the government was retaining subsidisation, so it felt it was well within its rights to make certain demands of the service providers.

He said the timetable for implementation was “next year”. “Hopefully, it will be the ADT – or the company it forms – that will win the bid. The European Commission has blocked our attempts to issue a direct order, so it has to go through the tender process,” said Dr Gatt.

He spoke about the future introduction of trams and said that while these are very feasible for Malta, with journey times being cut drastically, they were a large capital expense (e206-325) and maintenance costs of e7 million or so. He said that another big culture change will have to come from private motorists as they will have to accept that public transport will get priority over private traffic.