The impression the country gets during this phase between the end of the Arriva service and the dawn of the new service is one of being left in the dark while important decisions are taken.

Obviously, hopefully, it will all come right on the night.

But one would have thought there is a different approach to public policy than this silence and lack of explanations.

At the present stage the country is waiting for the government to come up with the call for an expression of interest and then wait to see how many will apply and submit their offer. That’s as regards the future.

But there are still many questions regarding the immediate past that have little or no relevance to the choice of the new provider and which all regard the end of the Arriva tender.

There is, to our way of seeing it, no real need for things to be covered up as if they are State secrets.

One very important issue regards payment. The government has stated that all it paid for the Arriva goodwill was one Euro.

One still has to be told what were the losses accumulated by Arriva over the past months. Can one be informed these losses will be absorbed by Arriva’s parent companies and simply forgotten?

There is also the matter of the King Long buses that are still in use, of course minus the bendy-buses. What was their original cost, and what price has the government paid for them?

There are also the many fines that Arriva owed to Transport Malta, plus other payments that had to be made to different contractors. Have all these been annulled?

It is a pity that most of the press events in this connection were made in a rather informal manner, without the presentation of details and facts and figures.

It is an even bigger pity that the issue will not be the subject of a parliamentary debate as if the two sides, for their various reasons, are afraid of discussing the Arriva failure and what comes next.

There is some truth in the minister’s argument that things were in such a bad state that the country risked Arriva upping and leaving without a substitute left instead, which may explain the strategy that has been used.

But at some point, sooner hopefully rather than later, full information must be given and the country needs to get reassurance that public money is being spent well and carefully.

That also goes for the ongoing operations including the recruitment of new drivers which may be required to enable the service to be at least kept up to its present levels. Many in the country were against the system used by Arriva to train its drivers many times under intense pressure to get the new recruits up and running as soon as possible instead of their being given proper training. One hopes that this new emergency will not allow such short-circuiting of procedures and real training until this becomes the norm.