Train Operators’ Revenue Protection Practices Review

Question

11:20:00

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government, following the independent review of train operators’ revenue protection practices published by the Office of Rail and Road on 4 June, whether they intend to modify systems of issuing rail tickets to improve their interavailability.

My Lords, deliberate fare-dodging has no place on our railways and is being tackled, but it is vital that passengers are treated fairly and consistently. We are urgently considering the helpful and comprehensive Office of Rail and Road report, with its sensible recommendations, and will respond to it as soon as possible. In the meantime, we continue to make it easier for passengers to buy the right fare, to make tickets on an increasingly unified publicly owned railway more inter-available, and to develop plans for Great British Railways to sell tickets online.

My Lords, the Minister knows that, under the new east coast main line timetable, many more passengers will rely on connecting services run by different train operators, but when they board the train, as happens when they board a train now, they are quite likely to hear an announcement saying that other operators’ tickets are not valid on this service and that they may face a penalty fare of £100. Indeed, the report to which my Question refers reveals many instances of passengers who inadvertently had the wrong ticket and were penalised. Does he recognise that this is a mess? Has he got people at work in his department trying to sort it out?

The noble Lord knows as much about the December east coast main line timetable as I do now. I compliment him because he asked the flexible public sector operators to add a stop at Berwick to the weekday 1900 train to Edinburgh from King’s Cross, and they have agreed. I think that is a great thing. On a more general point, the announcements are confusing because the ticketing system is confusing. In the particular circumstances of the east coast, where LNER has made arrangements for tickets to be inter-available so that passengers at stations such as Berwick can enjoy a similar level of train service, with a change, as they do now, we will make sure that the announcements are clear enough that people are not put off making the best journey.

The Minister will be aware that the first iteration of the timetable for the LNER services in question was withdrawn. As a result, as the noble Lord, Lord Beith, has identified, there are fewer direct services serving stations such as Darlington, Northallerton and others, meaning that more changes are to be made. Is there a role for his department to ensure, particularly given the special anniversary of the Darlington to Stockton line, that this could be revisited so that the original direct services are reinstated?

The new east coast main line timetable includes several big improvements, such as knocking over a quarter of an hour off the direct journey to Edinburgh and a service to Newcastle of three trains an hour, which is considerably in excess of the service on the Metropolitan line to Amersham. That is the objective of a railway timetable which is to serve the biggest flows with the best train service. In respect of Darlington and Northallerton, the noble Baroness knows that, in fact, Darlington will have more through-trains to London in December than it does now, as will Northallerton. Some of the other journeys will need a change, and the timetable is arranged to make the best of all those journeys while producing the benefits that I described.

My Lords, passengers are fed up with the complexity of rail fares and of the terms and conditions of tickets. When will passengers see a simpler, transparent new range of tickets ahead of Great British Railways coming into operation?

The noble Baroness is right to describe it as a mess. We are not waiting for Great British Railways. LNER’s changes to long-distance fares, which have been introduced progressively, have resulted in considerably greater passenger satisfaction with the way in which the fares are arranged now compared with before. I am expecting to see similar arrangements on the west coast main line and on Great Western in due course. I think the noble Baroness knows that we are rolling out pay-as-you-go in urban areas, as well as in London and the south-east. It is a long and complex job, and it is not helped by the fact that, fundamentally, the fares system has not changed since the railways were privatised. We are on it, and we are working hard at it.

On the west coast main line and on other routes, when Great British Railways actually happens, will it have control over the fares issued by open-access operators, or will they still be able to charge what they like for their own services?

My noble friend probably knows the answer, but I am happy to give it anyway. Open-access operators can charge what they like, and no doubt will continue to do so.

My Lords, I am sure this House would be reassured if the Minister himself was involved in these new practices. Can he give us an assurance that he is heavily involved and that all these new practices will mean less ticketless travel?

The long-term answer is that the railway deserves to be run by competent, professional people. The involvement of Ministers in decisions about timetables and fares is extremely unusual in world railways outside North Korea. I am doing what I am doing now because I think that changes need to be made, and we need to make them faster than we can bring in the legislation on Great British Railways. In the long term, the railways should be run by competent people to an overall government policy. That is the Government’s aim, and mine too.

My Lords, concerning those changes, the report referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Beith, from the ORR, a highly respected regulator, is a valuable piece of work on behalf of passengers. Does the Minister accept that, under the new arrangements for the railway, consulted on by the Government earlier this year, the ORR would lose those functions, vindicating the rights of passengers to a toothless passenger watchdog, and be stripped of its independent decision-making powers as to who has access to the track and what charges they pay? These decisions will be made by Great British Railways, an interested party. Is this not regulatory vandalism on the railways?

The noble Lord has a point of view, but I do not agree with it. Currently, the ORR is independent. In the future, the Government’s proposals will leave it independent. It will have a slightly different role in respect of access; it will be an appeal body. Fundamentally, somebody has to be in charge of the railway and somebody has to be in charge of the timetable. He will know, because we have discussed it here before, that it is mad that a Government Minister in the end has to decide to implement a railway timetable because nobody in the railway itself has the authority to do so. He is also wrong about describing the new arrangements for passengers. In due course he will see that the passenger standards authority will have real teeth and will represent passengers’ interests.

My Lords, many stations do not seem to have properly functioning electronic gates, particularly at weekends, and people just walk through. I wonder whether it is possible to do an audit of that. While the Minister is improving the lot of travellers, could he do away with “See It. Say It. Sorted”?

Ticketless travel is a real problem. Operators have to be on their toes, because leaving gates open at times when people travel means that they will just walk through them. It is not necessarily the case that those passengers do not have tickets, but it is certainly no deterrent to people who do not have tickets. “See It. Say It. Sorted”—oh dear, I have said that now—is actually a good deterrent. We have to be mindful of the safety of people, including women and girls, on the railway. We are going to refresh it, but I am sorry to tell the noble Baroness that we are going to carry on with it, because it is the right thing to do to make everybody travelling by train feel safe.

My Lords, Trainline tells me that, if I get the 15.16 pm train home to Cardiff from London Paddington this afternoon, I could save 5p by splitting my ticket. Will my noble friend the Minister’s reforms get rid of this sort of nonsense? Can he sort that?

It needs to be sorted and it will have to be sorted, over time. I refer to my experience at Transport for London, where we radically changed the fare system and introduced pay-as-you-go and Oyster, which took several years of incremental change. Fundamentally, the noble Lord is right: if you have enough time and effort, finding a cheaper way to travel through buying multiple tickets is not the way to market an effective railway or public transport service. We need to get to a stage when that nonsense is no longer prevalent.