Readers may recall that the investigation News OnTheWight carried out into exactly how much in public funds the Cross-Solent operators received during the first Lockdown.
If you missed it, here’s how you can catch-up.
It had been a bit of a struggle over the previous months to get to a point where we could report – and we were still being blocked from the breakdown of exactly how much money each of the companies received individually. The Department for Transport (DfT) claimed that it was commercially sensitive.
Challenged
News OnTheWight challenged this, explaining the Duopoly of the car ferry services and the Trioploy of foot passengers – with little competition, how could there be commercial sensitivity? That aside, it was public money being given away, therefore the public had a right to know.
Good news
Today came some good news. The DfT’s Information Rights Adviser had examined our challenge and decided in our favour.
| Red Funnel | £2,565,000 |
| Wightlink | £1,929,000 |
| Hovertravel | £396,000 |
There is a slight difference between the figures we’d received from the DfT before from our original FOI (£4,926,000) and the total of the newly supplied amounts (£4,890,000), but given the size of the amount involved, £36k is less than 1%.
Image: Images Money under CC BY 2.0
