Railways: Driver-Only Operated Trains

Question

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what representations they have received from organisations representing disabled people about the widespread introduction of Driver Only Operated trains on the rail network.

My Lords, the Government regularly receive ideas and feedback from the public and passenger bodies, including the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee. The proposed modernisation reforms are intended to provide greater flexibility for operators to deploy staff in multi-skilled customer-facing roles that are able to deliver more assistance for disabled passengers and those with additional needs.

My Lords, given that 45% of Network Rail stations are unstaffed and that a similar number are only partially staffed, does the Minister accept that that response does not reflect experiences in the real world? The addition of driver-only operation to unstaffed stations means that travel for the disabled, particularly those in wheelchairs, becomes virtually impossible. The Government’s attitude may well contravene both equalities and disability discrimination legislation.

The noble Lord makes an important point. Many factors feed into the accessibility of our rail network, and that is why in the Plan for Rail we committed to a national rail accessibility strategy. This will take a system-wide approach and ensure that we can make as many routes as possible accessible to all.

I confess to my noble friend that I am a cynical old politician. Recently, there has been the practice of split ticketing. It takes me two hours to come here and now I get two tickets, one for the first hour and one for the second hour. I do not need to change trains; the price is the same. Can she reassure me that this is not some device to show that more people take short journeys and therefore need fewer people on board the train to look after them, as opposed to people who take longer journeys, which might merit a guard?

My Lords, such cynicism! I will certainly take that away and establish why it might be the case, but my noble friend makes a very important point: our fares are too complicated and there are simply too many. That is why, when the Secretary of State spoke at the George Bradshaw address yesterday, he talked about what we are doing to simplify fares by extending the single-fare pilot and by piloting demand-based pricing, as there is in aviation. Some tickets could be substantially cheaper when the demand is less.

My Lords, driver-only trains will be accompanied by the closure of ticket offices and no platform staff in rural areas. Is the Minister concerned that these measures will discriminate against groups such as people with learning disabilities, who may often need reassurance, have difficulty buying tickets from machines or worry about last-minute changes to train times, and so on?

The key to the ticket office issue is not that they will close and the people staffing them will disappear; rather, they will come out from behind the Perspex. In the example given by the noble Baroness, somebody with learning difficulties could be assisted to use a ticket machine. Perhaps in time, they would feel more confident using the ticket machine with the assistance of somebody who can leave the ticket office. Any changes to ticket offices are set out in the ticketing and settlement agreement and are subject to local consultation.

My Lords, I have absolutely no doubt that the Minister puts disability and disabled passengers at the heart of her views, but for some years now she has been talking at the Dispatch Box about this strategy and how access will improve. I find that, at least once a week, the person I am expecting to get me off my train at my home station has not been alerted by the station I departed from. Without a conductor on the train, I have to go on to the next station, or even the one after that, and then try to get a train back—assuming I can. When will the system work for disabled people, whether they are in wheelchairs, are visually impaired or have learning difficulties?

I am appalled at the circumstances the noble Baroness faces. The system is in place but clearly is not working, and that is what we have to fix. We have to go through every element of our railway system, modernise it, and make it more accessible, reliable, punctual and affordable.

My Lords, may I table the idea of level boarding for trains, possibly with retracting ramps at each door? It would obviate the need for people always to be at the station if wheelchair operators could get on and off without anybody being there. It is not a total solution, but it is a solution.

The noble Lord raises an important point. There are many solutions to improve accessibility for wheelchair users and other people with reduced mobility. That is why the Access for All scheme was launched back in 2006, and it has made huge strides to improve the number of accessible routes into stations. Between 2019 and 2024, we are spending £383 million to add more accessible routes. When we built the railways centuries ago, they were not built to be accessible. I accept that it will take time to make them 100% accessible, but that is where we want to be.

My Lords, do I take it from the answer my noble friend gave to the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, that it will be possible to purchase a physical ticket at every mainline station?

It will be possible to purchase a physical ticket in the vast majority of cases, but I do not know about every single mainline station, as there are many hundreds of them. We have seen over time that people are not using physical tickets as much any more. We have to take into account the multiverse of different needs of the ticket-buying public to ensure that people can use the sorts of tickets that they want to.

My Lords, building on the testimony of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, the difference between disabled passengers who have a problem and ordinary passengers that have a problem is that in the case of the disabled passenger, the impact is almost catastrophic. Whereas occasional things going wrong are tolerable in a mainline system, for disabled passengers it must be 100%. The noble Baroness’s experience is not a singular one: the Office of Rail and Road did a survey of passenger assisting in July 2022. Almost a quarter—23%—of all the assistance that they booked was not received. 11% of passengers are not met by staff and a further 7% have to wait too long. And there is the emotional side of it: there is still concern that 28% do not feel confident that all the elements of the assistance they have booked will be delivered on the day of travel. The question is quite straightforward: is that acceptable? We do not want to hear about input; we want to hear about output.

Well, I do not think that anybody would say that that is acceptable and that is why we are actually doing things about it. Part of the reforms we want to introduce is to have multi-skilled, passenger-facing roles whereby people are trained to deal with passengers with reduced mobility and those with learning difficulties to help them use the railways, so that the railways work for them.

My Lords, do these important questions that have been raised today not raise the very clear point that the rail strikes are a battle, not simply against ordinary people who want to go to work, children who want to go to school and elderly people who want to visit their families, but most of all against perhaps the most disadvantaged category: the disabled? This is a strike which hits the disabled. Would my noble friend agree with that characterisation?

I agree with my noble friend that the strikes do indeed hit every single passenger who uses our railways. What worries me the most is that some of those passengers will not come back. We need a collaborative and constructive relationship with the unions, because things have to change. Our railways must change; we must see reform so that they work for disabled passengers and indeed all passengers.

My Lords, I travel to your Lordships’ House on the train most days. Not so long ago, I was travelling on a very crowded train when the young woman next to me completely passed out. We were crowded shoulder to shoulder. I did not know whether she had had some sort of attack or simply fainted. There was no means of getting the guard’s attention—there was no guard. Now, the young woman concerned may or may not have been in dire difficulty, but the fact is that all trains now tell you that you cannot pull a communication cord but must wait until the next station. Supposing she had had some sort of heart attack, and there was no guard there to help her. It is a terrible experience to have gone through, and what the Minister has said does not reassure me at all that she understands the predicament of disabled people or people in the position I was in.

What we are looking at is not necessarily taking people off trains but ensuring that the people who are on the trains are able to provide precisely the sort of assistance that that person may have needed. The reality is that if one is on a train which stops fairly frequently, the best option, if it is driver-only-operated and there is no guard, is to wait until the next station, because such trains tend to be on routes where the stations very close together. On longer routes, where the stations are far apart, there are other people on the train looking after passengers, and in those circumstances that person would have been able to help.