Yet for the six months to September (article date 21st September) estimates had TOC support at £3.5bn:
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-h...ways-ahead-of-contract-shake-up-idUKKCN26C0KB
Whilst that's not an insignificant amount, it's less than some on here have estimated it at.
It's also worth nothing that if that support wasn't given then chances are many staff would have been furloughed and would have cost a significant amount of that cost without having the railways running to provide travel for those key workers (including NHS staff) to be able to continue to get to work.
Anyway, what is done is done and the point is that the railways should, once things start to return towards things being more normal, be looking to try and encourage people back to using them.
If it doesn't then yes cuts would be likely to be following in short order, however if it can get back to nearly similar finances (even if that's only to, or better than, 85% of pre Covid-19 numbers) as before then what would be the point in significant cuts?
As my previous post highlighted you've got to WFH a lot (probably about 50% of the time) before you start seeing much of a saving over annual season tickets. As such the savings people are going to look for may be from housing.
For instance Farnborough is 45 minutes from Waterloo, but a house there is noticeably cheaper than 30 minutes out from Waterloo on a metro services and so you may find people spend the same (or even slightly more) on rail tickets even though they are traveling less. As the inconvenience of living a bit further out with a reduced frequency is less of an issue if you're not traveling everyday.
An extra 30 minutes a day when you're doing it 5 days a week is an extra 113 hours a year out of the house, do that 2 days a week and it falls to 45 hours. If you've saved 135 hours by WFH, then you're still 90 hours up.
