Your coverage of the public transport reform (‘ATP expecting fares to increase once reform starts’, TMID, 6 August) has become rather odd after one of your reporters took up the issue apparently without any attempt at research or reference to fact. Instead his sole “source of information” appears to be the president of the association which runs the bus service today, which service will be retired when the reformed service is rolled out: hardly an objective or even a well informed source.

To set a short number of facts straight for your reporter:

The provision of public transport services in Malta in a reformed context will be regulated by a concession contract for 10 years. That contract does not give the operator (Arriva being the bidder preferred for that role) any discretion on deciding bus fares, whether in the first three years of the service nor indeed for all of the 10 years. Therefore the following myths which we will repeat for the sake of clarity are figments of hostile imaginations:

Not true that “Arriva will raise prices at will”;

Not true that “weekend ticket prices will be more expensive”;

Not true that “we don’t know what the ticket prices will be”;

Not true that “fares will shoot up after the next election”;

Not true that “the Transport Ministry has remained mum on the fares of the new service”. We published the fares last October and they have been on our website since. They are still there.

The prices for the new service were published before the tender document was even handed over to Arriva along with the other potential bidders to submit their bid. The Malta Independent reported those fares extensively and we do not understand how this reporting seems to have been “forgotten” since it was first reported in October 2009.

Neither the Transport Ministry, nor any other public agency, will be employing 1,100 people to run the bus service. The legally permissible option of running a public transport service by a state-owned agency has long been discarded and this is why we issued a tender to engage a contractor to provide a service.

Should negotiations with Arriva find a successful conclusion, it will be up to Arriva to employ staff. The vast majority of that number will be bus drivers because driving buses is the core business of a bus operation.

Again, a number of basic facts – all long in the public domain – need to be repeated for the benefit of your reporter who seems to have missed them altogether:

Not true that “existing bus drivers do not know if the new operator will give them a job”. If they do want to work, they have a job guaranteed for the next 10 years. Naturally they must get used to an entirely different working environment and corporate discipline from what they are used to today, but that is simply a fact of life.

Not true that “no one knows how much the new bus operator will pay bus drivers”. As a minimum, bus drivers are guaranteed the salary they claim today in their subsidy workings.

Not true that “no one knows the working hours the bus drivers will have to work in the new system”. Drivers’ 16-hours-plus shifts of today will be replaced by regulated 40-hour weeks of eight-hour shifts with breaks for resting.

We regret we cannot clarify for your reporter “where the new call centre will be set up” as this will be a decision entirely up to the new operator. What we can say is that one will need to be set up and whichever its location it must be able to respond to phone calls made from anywhere in Malta.

The new bus service will do away with today’s practice of buses being taken for sleep-overs outside the residences of their owners, where they are also repaired and cleaned. Maintenance, repair, cleaning and over-night parking will be conducted in centralised facilities managed by the operator. So the question carried by your newspaper, “where will bus drivers be allowed to wash their buses?”, is redundant not least because it seems to be stuck in today’s system rather than the reformed one.

We understand that bus drivers and bus owners of the existing system will have a lot to speculate, in the case of some of them without any reference to the facts that have been public for months and reported on extensively in the press.

We do not understand, however, how this speculation, utterly devoid of fact, is taken up by your reporter as “information” from a source of any relevance.

Amanda Ciappara

Communications Coordinator

Ministry for Infrastructure, Transport and Communications

Editorial note: What is “odd” is not giving space to the Association of Public Transport (ATP), which is rightly concerned about the future of bus drivers in Malta, but the fact that for a whole week the Transport Ministry did not reply to questions sent by The Malta Independent. It did, however, then take just 24 hours to reply to the comments made by the ATP.