Now this is something which gets me mad, how can in a matter of 4 years can the senior management team/figures/bosses in TFL manage to get an increase of £10 million.... Unless I'm reading something wrong
Just curious to know, how does this somehow work in Birmingham with National Express being the most dominant operators whilst there are smaller companies and a few big ones (Diamond, First and Arriva)
The situation you've described in Birmingham (as the case in the rest of the UK except for London) is deregulation. Essentially, any company with an operating licence can decide to run routes wherever they like, and they take on the free market commercial risk of doing so. This has been the case since 1986, and if there is the commercial case to run buses in a particular area, then operators will stay as well as move in. This would explain why large cities (such as Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool) have several operators serving them. On the flip side, there are other areas (the area of West Surrey around Staines and Woking is one example) where running services is not commercially attractive at all and operators end up withdrawing completely from the area after heavy losses.
Essentially, bus services in London are all run by Transport for London, its simply the case that they outsource the staffing and provision of vehicles to private operators. The competitive process for bidding for these routes does keep the tender prices down, unless one or some of the bidders has a poor performance record, its generally 'lowest bid wins'. I believe the lack of huge profits from running services in this fashion led to Stagecoach leaving London in 2006 (the came back 4 years later) as well as First Group pulling out for good a few years back. I really cannot see how giving it all to one operator to run everything would either save money in the long term and work in practice.
Going to Transport for London's finances, it's not just been since Sadiq Khan got elected that their finances took a tumble, this has been going on for years now. It would seem to me that the organisations primary role is to be used as a political football rather than running a decent transport network whilst keeping their budget in control. They are able to spend vast amounts of money on various vanity schemes designed to keep incumbent mayors in office, but don't seem to able to think about where the money comes from.
They do have a few revenue issues going against them; in 2014 they lost a £700m annual grant from the Department of Transport, and it was also recently revealed that none of the estimated £500m a year raised from London based vehicle owners in VED (aka road tax) goes to TFL (TFL also maintains the trunk roads in London, where as the Highways Agency has responsibility outside the capital). That's on central government, and I would like to think that if I'm taxing my car to keep it on the road, some of the money raised from that actually goes to those who's job it is to fix it.
But more politically motivated vanity schemes have also not helped; the Emirates Air Line, the New Routemaster buses, the Santander Cycle Hire scheme, the endless delays to getting Crossrail open, the Hopper fare, the fares freeze, free travel for under 18s and over 60s are amongst many of the things where TFL has been happy to spend money and forget to raise it. Note that not all of these are the current mayor's fault, previous occupants of the job can take the credit/blame for many of these schemes.
Ultimately it will take an act of political 'bravery' to get TFL back to a budget surplus, mainly ensuring that those who use services make a proper contribution to the financial costs of running said services. I personally cannot stand Sadiq Khan, but I doubt Shaun Bailey would do any better. His recent criticisms of Khan and his 'solutions' show that he hasn't got a clue how to run TFL himself. Maybe it would be better in the long run to go back to how it was pre-2000; a central government quango (like Network Rail is now) with the job of effectively running services whilst keeping costs down and not being used to further political careers.