Learn English – Is “offer something someone” without “to” in between correct

Whether the quoted sentence—

The 88-year-old, who lives off Hills Road, said: “On our buses it is very common for young people to occupy priority seats and are quite unprepared to offer them those the seats are meant for."

—works satisfactorily and coherently as colloquial British English is not something I can judge; but to a U.S. English speaker (me), it appears to be missing some pieces, which a (U.S.) reader trying to make sense of it must supply. To me, the most confusing part of the original sentence's wording is the string "to offer them those the seats." The wording starts to make sense if you replace "them" with "the seats," and "those" with "the people," yielding this intermediate version of the sentence:

The 88-year-old, who lives off Hills Road, said: “On our buses it is very common for young people to occupy priority seats and are quite unprepared to offer the seats the people the seats are meant for."

At this point we can more clearly see two other problems that wording has: a lack of parallel structure between "to occupy priority seats" and "are quite unprepared to offer the seats," even though each of these phrases evidently is intended to branch out from "young people"; and the absence of a needed preposition in the midst of "the seats the people the seats." We can fix the parallelism problem either by reworking the second phrase to match the first:

...for young people to occupy priority seats and to be quite unprepared to offer the seats...

or we can simply take the two phrases out of parallel altogether:

...for young people to occupy priority seats, but the young people are quite unprepared to offer the seats...

And we can fix the second problem by inserting to at the appropriate place:

"the seats to the people the seats."

This yields a final version of the sentence that correctly identifies the referents for them and those (from among the options "buses," "priority seats," "young people," and "people in need of priority seating"—the last of which options did not appear in the original sentence although it was the intended referent for "those") and supplies the various words missing from the original:

The 88-year-old, who lives off Hills Road, said: “On our buses it is very common for young people to occupy priority seats and to be quite unprepared to offer those seats to the people the seats are meant for."

This revised sentence expresses the sense of the original sentence, I think. But if you were preparing it for publication, you would have to present the 88-year-old's comments as a paraphrase because the wording is no longer a faithful quotation of what the person actually said.