Sir – I use my old person’s bus card often and regard it as some small ‘thank you’ for the taxes that I paid, and still pay, having been in paid employment from just after my 18th birthday until just before my 75th.

In many places, such as London and Manchester, I am waved on to the buses without ceremony when I show my card. Here in Oxford, though, the bus operators issue me with a ‘complimentary’ ticket.

I guess it is the notional cost of these tickets, summed by their computers, that is the basis of the remarks by Keith Ludeman, chief executive of Go-Ahead Group that you report in your issue of May 7.

Mr Ludeman may well have occasion to dispute with the Government the compensation he is paid for the use of his buses by pensioners, but he has no reason to do so by asserting that this use should be limited. I have never yet been on a crowded bus with my pensioner card, is Mr Ludeman suggesting that if it were not for pensioner use he would cut his not very adequate bus services?

When young, I lived in London where the bus and tram operator was the London County Council, and subsequently London Transport. The services were not always ideal, but they were run as a public service, and were not dominated by the profit motive.

I think that Mr Ludeman should remember that privatisation was sold to the electorate as a method for improving bus services, not as a means of getting higher dividends for bus shareholders.

Professor Gerald Elliott, Oxford