The ticket office closure con

Saturday 8th July 2023

The delusional Rail Delivery Group reckon it’ll be better than ever.

Moving staff from somewhere everyone knows where to find them (ie something called a ‘ticket office’) to “out of ticket offices and onto station platforms and concourses to support better, face-to-face interactions” is not only plain daft, it’s illogical.

New multi-skilled ‘customer help’ roles “will mean staff are able to help more customers across a whole range of needs, from buying tickets, to offering travel advice and helping those with accessibility needs”.

It’s said that 12% (10% has also been mentioned) of passengers use ticket offices. But that’s an average figure across all of England. Which means for low usage stations, eg Berwick in East Sussex (pictured below) the numbers buying tickets including from the ticket office will be considerably lower than at say Euston or Birmingham New Street, both up for closure along with other ‘big name’ stations..

An average figure in matters like this is completely meaningless. There was one extreme example quoted on the radio of a station selling one ticket a week. Well close that ticket office down then, but don’t use that as a justification to close say, Manchester Piccadilly. What a completely foolish and non-sensical way of making a proposal.

There may well be justification in closing offices where use has reduced to single percentage figures. But that’s no justification for closing offices where sales are much higher.

In any event, that average figure of 10% or 12% of passengers using ticket offices is for a reason. Maybe they don’t want to use online, apps and ticket vending machines (TVMs) because it’s harder for them to buy tickets through these methods than from a knowledgeable and helpful member of staff. Or maybe their ticket isn’t available through those channels.

This proposal comes at a time when passenger numbers are still struggling to reach pre Covid levels so you’d think the last thing DfT and the rail industry would want to do is make it harder for people to buy tickets and access the railway.

It’s likely a good proportion of the 12% may well decide not to travel at all or use a car instead thereby worsening the downturn in passenger numbers.

The RDG reckon 99% of transactions currently taking place through ticket offices can be done on a TVM. That may be the case if you know what you’re doing. But many passengers don’t and that’s why they use a ticket office to guide and help them through the minefield of ticket complexity and restrictions and are just happy and reassured someone will sell them a ticket.

A leading rail ticket retailer quotes there are 2,822 ticket types with 901 unique ticket names, 655 restriction codes and 1,288 route codes in the rail ticketing system and this complexity has only got worse since Covid as Train Operating Companies have introduced even more ticket types. No wonder passengers when given a choice, as below at Cambridge station when I visited recently, shun the TVMs and queue for human interaction at a ticket office.

Can you imagine Tesco deciding to do away with staff at checkouts because x% of their customers now use self service check outs or scan-and-pay? It maybe a declining proportion of shoppers who use staffed checkouts but that’s their preference and Tesco and their competitors are in business to fulfill customer preferences and do so.

Is closing ticket offices just a cost saving measure? We’re constantly being told rail industry costs need to be cut and the DfT have tasked the Train Operating Companies to achieve savings but if ticket office staff are simply moving from being behind the glass to being “customer facing” how is that going to make cost savings?

If it’s not about cutting staff numbers then instead of moving staff out from behind counters to help passengers struggling with the TVMs why not just let the staff sell tickets to passengers directly from their own machine in this thing called a ticket office?

The DfT and RDG take us for fools if they think we swallow the idea this isn’t about cutting the number of staff. I hear statutory notices advising of jobs under threat are already being issued to staff in some companies and Northern, for example, is reported to have openly admitted staff numbers will reduce.

The whole thing is a complete con dreamt up by the Department for Transport which instructed the Train Operating Companies to coordinate their announcements and use similar flowery language about a better environment for customers in their justifications.

Here’s an idea. Instead of having staff help passengers struggling with TVMs why not make TVMs easier to use, then, in the fullness of time more ticket offices might be so little used they could be closed?

Although things have improved with options for cheaper tickets now shown more clearly on the screen others have become way too complex with passengers required to specify far too much information, including return journey times, before buying a simple ticket.

There are still examples where passengers need an advanced degree in TVM Manipulation to work around bureaucratic restrictions originally introduced to limit fraud but with the advent of online ticket sales are now irrelevant.

Here’s just one example: buying a ticket from a station within the Network Railcard area (broadly London and the South East) to a station outside of that area – eg my home station Hassocks to Great Malvern (which I did on Thursday) will default to not allow you to use a Senior Railcard before 09:00 with the option being greyed out when you press ‘Add Railcard’.

The workaround is to press “One Step Back” from that screen to the ‘change date and time’ icon on the previous screen and instead of the current time, kid the machine it’s really 09:00 by entering that time, then return to the ‘Add Railcard’ option and lo and behold the Senior Railcard is no longer greyed out.

This is a real faff and takes time while other passengers queuing behind you politely tut tut. It’s immensely frustrating for everyone.

And it’s all so unnecessary since there’s no question of Senior Railcard holders trying to defraud the system by using their Railcard when they shouldn’t as the ticket gates won’t accept a Railcard enabled ticket pre 09:00 anyway so your ticket gets inspected by the staff member on the gateline.

Of course, in the nirvana world inhabited by the out of touch civil servants and Ministers at the DfT there’ll be happy, smiling multi tasking staff floating around to point out all these workarounds to you.

Except the reality is there’ll be occasions when there’s no staff available or they’ll be busy helping passengers with accessibility needs on and off trains in this new multi tasking world, and we all know the reality is staff numbers will be cut. That’s the purpose of this exercise.

The RDG’s website features a couple of embarrassing videos showing how wonderful the new ‘ticket office less’ way of working will be.

These feature Oxford Parkway and Bicester Village, opened in 2015, (see above) as well as Reading Green Park, opened May 2023, (see below) both of which have an open desk style counter in place of a ticket office. Apparently it’s the wonderful future that awaits us all …

… and is all very nice but how many stations are modelled on, or have room for, that open style layout?

That’s a rhetorical question.

Take Burgess Hill…

.. one station up from Hassocks on the Brighton main line (see above and below).

There’s barely enough room for the ticket gates in the ticket office area let alone a reception desk for a relaxed smiling multi-tasking member of staff to sit.

And the coveted TVM? That’s outside. So much for a wonderful passenger environment.

What’s the point of moving staff from inside the ticket office, where they can efficiently do their work, out into the open and outside, where they’ll be exposed to inclement weather, only to help passengers buy tickets at that TVM, when they can more easily buy them from the ticket office within the building?

Only in the rarefied out-of-touch-with-reality world of the Department of Transport and their lapdogs at the RDG can this be considered an improvement and something that stands up to logical scrutiny. It isn’t and it doesn’t.

Which brings me to the location and number of TVMs. Take Hassocks for example. It has one slimline TVM in the open outside the Brighton bound platform (albeit with a small cover above it – see below) which on sunny mornings is completely unusable as the sun shines directly on to the screen which faces due east making it impossible to read, while in the rain you get soaked just waiting to buy a ticket. Customer friendly? I don’t think so.

The other TVM is outside the London bound platform, but at least it’s under cover (see below), but whenever the ticket office is closed because Southern managers haven’t arranged cover for the two regulars having a day off there’s a frustratingly long queue in which you wait your turn in a nail biting race against when the train is due.

I’d really like to know how long Southern recommend passengers should allow between arriving at the station and their train departure to buy a ticket in such circumstances.

I understand in the rush to implement these changes there are no plans to install more TVMs. Anywhere.

This is real ‘cart before horse’ stuff.

This isn’t the London Underground’s simplified zonal fare system with Oyster and then contactless when Sir Peter Hendy oversaw the closure of ticket offices for Mayor Johnson in 2015.

This is a national rail network with a Byzantine complex array of fares, tickets and prices which the Government and rail industry have failed to reform despite countless promises and consultations. The fare structure needs sorting before doing away with the very people in a place (called a ticket office) where passengers know they can get help and be sold a ticket for the right price for their journey.

And those TVM anomalies need sorting out to actually make it easy to use so you don’t need staff to help you.

And please, do away with those TVM algorithms and online that make you specify a time for a return journey before you can buy a ticket. I just want an off-peak return coming back when I choose later on. End of.

And how can I buy a London Travelcard on an app or online? Oh; I know, let’s do away with those popular tickets too. That’ll solve that problem.

Make no mistake this is about cutting costs and making it less attractive for passengers to travel and stifling off demand, so there can be more cuts and the all important subsidy to the rail industry can be reduced. That’s what the all powerful Treasury are demanding.

The consultation closes on Wednesday 26th July. A copy of the somewhat basic consultation response form is available here on the Transport Focus website.

Roger French

Blogging timetable; 06:00 TThS and the occasional Su which is fast becoming DRT blogging day, including another one tomorrow.