Translink facing annual operating loss of up to £30m, MLAs told

Northern Ireland’s public transport operator is facing an operating loss of up to £30 million in the current financial year, MLAs have been told.

Translink’s group chief executive Chris Conway said the situation could see the company left with cash reserves of less than £10 million – equating to one week’s costs.

Mr Conway told Stormont’s Infrastructure Committee that the powersharing Exective had to decide on what funding is available for public transport and “what level of service it can afford to operate”.

He told MLAs that for the past decade resource funding for Translink had been below what is required in its public service obligation (PSO), but that this would normally be supplemented by additional funding from monitoring rounds throughout financial years.

He said: “In 2024/25 there was limited monitoring rounds funding and this meant that the PSO funding requirement for bus and rail services was not able to be met in whole.

“This PSO funding is for the socially necessary services that we run where the fares don’t cover the complete cost of running the service.

“Therefore, Translink, while continuing to deliver those services, made an operating loss of around £16 million last year.”

He said the funding for public transport in 2025/26 had “reduced in real terms”.

Mr Conway added: “Therefore, based on Translink continuing to deliver the current bus and rail services, we will make a further significant loss this year.

“And our cash reserves will reduce to what I would consider a financially unsustainable level.”

Mr Conway said the company is “doing all it can” to manage costs and maximise revenues”.

He said: “This is obviously a very critical issue for the public transport network.

“I think it is important now at Executive level there is a decision taken on what funding is available for public transport and therefore what level of service it can afford to operate and maintain on an ongoing basis.”

Committee chairman Peter Martin asked what the implications were for future years if more funding is not made available.

Mr Conway said: “It can’t continue even this year.

“The loss we would be forecasting for this year is between £25 million and £30 million.

“That would take our cash reserves down to below £10 million.

“That is about one week’s worth of our costs. That is not sustainable to have that low level of cash.”

He added: “Take the weekend we have just had with Storm Amy, we have had teams out dealing with damage across the network.

“We had over 30 trees down on the network, we had chainsaw crews out, we had all sorts of staff out getting services back up and running.

“That is a lot of unbudgeted cost and loss of revenue during that time.

“If you don’t have the cash reserves, you can’t deal with those situations.”

Mr Conway said if the current funding situation remained, Translink would have to ask the Department for Infrastructure for a “realistic public service obligation for the current network”.

He added: “Or we would have to ask the department to say what is a network you can afford and define that for us so we can run that network.”

Mr Martin asked if the choices were to run out of money, receive extra funding or cut services.

He said: “It is not sustainable to go on providing a level of public service transport that you currently have in the future …there won’t be the money there?”

Mc Conway said: “That is exactly the options.

“On the first one, Translink is a public corporation, we have a board of directors, we have duties under the Companies Act, we would have to take steps to avoid Translink running out of cash.

“That is certainly not where we want to be.

“That is why we urgently need the discussion about what is a network that is affordable and how do we make the changes to get to that point.”