Railways (Penalty Fares) (Amendment) Regulations 2022

Motion to Regret

Moved by

That this House regrets that the Railways (Penalty Fares) (Amendment) Regulations 2022 (SI 2022/1094) increase penalty fares at a time of (1) substantial disruptions on many services, in particular those of Avanti West Coast, and (2) continuing customer confusion over complex and differing ticket pricing arrangements from different train companies, in a system described as “too fragmented, too complicated, and too expensive to run” by the Department for Transport and the Williams Rail Review in its report, Great British Railways: The Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail; and calls on His Majesty’s Government urgently to bring forward legislation as part of its promise to simplify ticketing arrangements.

My Lords, nothing perhaps demonstrates better the Government’s tin ear towards the railway system in this country and the problems suffered by passengers on it than the instrument they have put down on penalty fares. To increase the penalty fare from £20 to £100 is somewhat draconian to say the least, and is the reason I have tabled this regret Motion. The Motion talks about substantial disruption to the railway system. Again, to introduce this measure from the Government Benches, given the current situation with the railway system, strikes me as a provocation too far.

Could the Minister define when the penalty fare will be invoked against a passenger? No one would condone people travelling on our railway without a ticket, but the notes on the penalty fare regulations refer to a “valid ticket”. The House will be aware of the concern I have raised previously about the number and variety of different tickets on our system. Perhaps the Minister could tell us whether the penalty fare clause will be invoked if someone is bearing a ticket which is not valid on a particular service for any reason.

There are 2,576 stations on Network Rail; 45% of them are unstaffed and an equal proportion are partially staffed. Does the Minister appreciate the difficulty of actually buying a ticket at many of these stations? It will be said, of course, that someone who travels from an unstaffed station to an unstaffed station should purchase a ticket from the ticket machine, but there are 55 million different fares on our railway system; I do not think the machine has yet been invented that could cope with all of them. It is pretty difficult on occasions to get the right ticket from a machine, so I would like to know from the Minister whether the penalty clause will be invoked if someone inadvertently buys the wrong ticket.

I said that 45% of our railway stations are unstaffed. One imagines bucolic rural stations, which it would obviously be impractical to fully staff, but the list of unstaffed stations includes stations such as Barry Island, in Wales, where almost 1 million passengers boarded or alighted from trains in 2020—the latest year I could find figures for to use in this debate.

Another aspect of my regret Motion refers not only to the disruption but to the number and types of tickets that are on sale in our railway system. In the current issue of Modern Railways, there is a column headed “Blood and Custard” which is written about the railway industry generally. Under the sub-heading “Bonkers ticketing” Modern Railways said:

“Our lively conference session at Modern Railways EXPO on Wednesday 23 November about revenue, fares and ticketing highlighted some interesting anecdotes about our fares system. Alistair Lees of Independent Rail Retailers emphasised the sheer complexity as he called for a simpler system. He said there are currently 2,822 ticket types, 901 unique ticket names, 655 restriction codes and 1,288 route codes”—

it may even be more because the conference took place, as I say, in November. It continues:

“The number of ticket types has grown at least sevenfold since privatisation, and more than 300 ticket types have been introduced since the start of the pandemic.”

That is the complex nature of travelling by train. Early in my railway career I was a booking clerk; I could not cope with the present system. It was fairly straightforward in those days. Somebody came, paid their money, and you gave them a cardboard ticket—it was known as the Edmondson system. Imagine how it is these days.

The Minister will revert, as I am sure the brief will tell her to, to the fact that ticket machines are provided at many stations. I revert to Birmingham International. I cannot work the ticket machines there, they are so complex, and many of the staff cannot get the right ticket out of the machines for the same reason. A few Thursdays ago, every one of the ticket machines was marked “Out of order”. As I have indicated, after 10 pm, when no staff are on duty on the concourse, how are people supposed to buy a ticket to travel to London, Bournemouth, Coventry or Birmingham? The answer is that they cannot. Instead of allowing the train operating companies to get away with the nonsense that they do, the Minister and her fellow Ministers should be insisting that they provide a proper service, which they do not do at the present time. I can only foresee things getting worse.

We were told that all this was going to change. As long ago as 2018, whoever was the Transport Secretary at the time—it is probably half a dozen Transport Secretaries ago—promised a simplification of the ticket system, which is as complicated as I have just outlined. Mr Grant Shapps, ever modest, during his spell as Secretary of State for Transport added his name to somebody else’s report to show how keen he was to simplify the ticketing arrangements on our railway system. He has been airbrushed out, a bit like the photo he published recently where the Prime Minister had been airbrushed out. He has had more jobs since than he has had aliases over the years. The fact is that since 2018, when his promises were made, nothing has been done to simplify the railway system and there are no signs of anything being done to simplify it in the future. We are committing fraud on the travelling public and fraud on the taxpayer with the current system. I beg to move.

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow my noble friend Lord Snape. His speech was very interesting but I am afraid that everything he said about the problem with getting tickets is true. It is very tempting to refer to Spain, where I believe they have just announced that they will offer free travel to everyone on the trains. That would solve all the problems except those of the Treasury, so it is probably not worth even talking about. It comes down to the failure of the TOCs. They have no incentive because all the income revenue goes to the Treasury. That is where we are at the moment, and we have to find a solution. It must be a way of encouraging more people to use the trains and it must also, I hope, increase the revenue to the Treasury and to the operators in a way which does not put people off. My noble friend’s comments about Birmingham International and everything else were frightening.

We also look forward to hearing from the Minister on where the legislation is; it is part of the SI. She will probably be able to tell us that when she comes to respond.

I have been talking to one or two experts on the ticketing issue. I understand that a year ago, in January 2022, a ticketing system for the whole country was ready to be put in legislation. It is called CORS—the consolidated online retail system. The Department for Transport approved it. It is basically an online system that would allow anyone to buy a ticket between, to and from any station on the network remotely on their iPad. It is guaranteed to give you the cheapest ticket. It means that, with a little bit of checking, it would reduce the need for a large number of ticket inspectors and booking clerks. Obviously, there must be facilities for people who cannot use it—I accept that—but such a system has the great advantage of guaranteeing people the best deal for whatever journey they want to take, and they would be able to check it.

What this system needs, I am told, is for the Department for Transport to put it out to tender. Apparently, it does not need legislation, so why are we bothering to wait for the legislation and other things to come in? If it went out to tender, quite a few companies would want to run it and to make sure that the information they provided was 100% reliable and available to all the different ticket retailers—there are several hundred of them, I think—in this country. One can see that this system would also give people continuous information on their journey, which would certainly help people on Avanti routes, so that they knew what was going on.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Snape, for giving us an opportunity to debate this issue.

In principle, I fully accept the need to update penalty fares in line with inflation. However, if you look at the £20 fine that was fixed in legislation in 2005, the rates of inflation have been very low in the intervening years since 2005. It is highly unlikely that overall prices have multiplied by a factor of five in the past 18 years. Such a swingeing increase in the level of the fine or penalty fare is tone-deaf in a period of such massive disruption; for example, through strikes on the railway and, leaving the strikes aside, a very poor service from several train operating companies—including TransPennine and Avanti, to name but two. I fear that customers are totally fed up with the service they are getting in some parts of the country. Faced with fines of this size, they are likely to lose their temper with staff; I am not happy with the risks that that might pose.

This is apparently to be called not a “fine” but a “penalty fare”. That invites the question of whether the penalty fare should relate to the size of the fare that you should have paid; surely it should. You might have been going to pay a fare of as low as £5 to go from one stop to the next, or you might have been due to pay a fare of much nearer to £50 or £100. So the £100 fine—let us call it a fine because that is what it is—becomes totally disproportionate if you were due to pay only £5, whereas it is very reasonable if you were due to pay £50.

My belief—it echoes the comments made by the noble Lords, Lord Snape and Lord Berkeley—is that the promised reform and simplification of fares must come first. I am frustrated by the delays to government plans. The reform of fares has been promised to us year after year. At the moment, it is only too easy to get the wrong fare by mistake. For example, I believe that there are three different definitions of “peak time” for trains going through Birmingham; Birmingham is featuring largely in our debate this evening.

Can the Minister please explain exactly what that means in practice for the member of staff who has to issue the penalty fare? Also, what is the difference in practice between a penalty fare for travelling between Swindon and Bristol Parkway and one issued between Bristol Parkway and Newport? More importantly for me, as someone travelling from Wales—I am interested because this is what people will ask me about—what about people travelling from Newport to Bristol Parkway? Will the penalty fares be issued only when people get through the Severn tunnel on the English side? I can see the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, being interested in this as well. He knows as well as I do that the rail line between Cardiff and, say, Birmingham, goes up the border and threads in and out of Wales—will staff be standing there waiting to decide which country to issue the penalty fare in? To make a serious point about this, what discussions have been had with the Welsh Government about liaising in a way that ensures that life is sensible and bearable for the staff working on trains going between Wales and England?

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Snape, for introducing this very interesting debate.

Under this Government, fares are rising and the promised investment is not being delivered. For Ministers to decide that this should be a priority, rather than the introduction of a Great British Railways Bill, therefore beggars belief. This instrument adds further complexity to the ticketing system. I therefore begin by asking: how have the Government communicated these changes to passengers?

The department has said that it seeks to increase penalties to deter fare evasion more efficiently. Can the Minister confirm whether there has been an assessment of the unintended consequences that this could have on individuals who have been unable, rather than unwilling, to purchase a ticket? Given that this has been introduced to address concerns of operators, can she confirm whether the department has also engaged with trade unions to ask their thoughts on the changes?

The noble Lord, Lord Snape, raises a series of points which I echo. I specifically support his criticism of Avanti West Coast. The Government’s decision to extend that contract was seen by the public as a reward for abject failure, and I still cannot understand why the Government chose to hand over millions more in taxpayers’ cash to an operator that has so clearly failed.

I share the noble Lord’s concerns regarding ticketing too. All this is evidence of the broader problem with the Government’s rail policy—a lack of direction. Short-term decision-making has held back long-term planning on the rail network, whereas modernisation, simpler ticketing and guaranteed universal accessibility is clearly not a focus for Ministers. The noble Lord is right to draw attention to the delays in implementing the Williams-Shapps review and the promised legislation. Can the Minister confirm whether a railway Bill will be introduced in this Parliament?