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It’s not just disabled people like me who need railway ticket offices

The Tories have decided to close nearly all of England’s 1,007 station ticket offices. They’re on completely the wrong track, argues James Moore – and making everybody’s world smaller

Tuesday 24 October 2023 15:34 BST
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More than 600,000 people responded to the government’s consultation about closing railway ticket offices
More than 600,000 people responded to the government’s consultation about closing railway ticket offices (PA Wire)

In a recent profile interview, rail minister Huw Merriman broke one of the cardinal rules of political life – he said the quiet bit out loud.

Talking to the Politics Home website about his journey to the Commons – how he climbed the greasy pole to the top, rather than his route to work that morning – he let something slip: “I think I’m actually a very bad parliamentary performer.”

Lucky, then, the minister didn’t have to appear this week before the transport select committee that scrutinises his work.

Instead, they wrote him a stiff letter. In it, they barracked the minister for his administration’s decision to close almost all of the 1,007 train station ticket offices in England.

Their thinking goes that only 12 per cent of all train tickets are now purchased from the booths, compared with 85 per cent in the mid-90s – so why not redeploy that staff to work on station platforms, where they can more readily offer passenger assistance?

But ask anyone who’s needed help at a station whose ticket office has already closed – passenger assistance is practically non-existent. Earlier this week, my colleague Holly Evans wrote movingly in the Independent about her experience of being confronted by a stranger at a Tube station platform – and no staff came to her aid.

That more than 680,000 people have responded to a consultation on the government’s plans – the biggest ever response to a public consultation – ought to be a big red warning light to the government that there’s trouble on the line ahead. Which was exactly what the Commons transport committee warned yesterday, saying the closure plans had gone “too far, too fast”.

The closure of ticket offices isn’t just a problem for those with mobility issues. It also has a brutal impact on people with visual impairments, as well as those with neuro-diverse conditions. It also has the unintended consequence of convincing the elderly that they’re somehow unsafe or unwelcome on the railways – so they don’t travel, meaning that the world that was once open to them begins to shrink, confining them to their homes.

At an earlier transport committee hearing, Katie Pennick, campaigns manager for Transport for All, explained: “The idea that staff currently being behind the glass is a problem that needs to be fixed is not the case at all; it’s actually one of the most important accessibility features of a ticket office. It’s a designated place where disabled people can go and be assured that they will find assistance from that place.”

Without that designated location, she told MPs that disabled people were faced with “traipsing round a station”, trying to locate a member of staff and request assistance.

She also criticised the idea of ‘mobile teams’, saying: “It’s completely ludicrous to suggest that disabled people should turn up at a station, use the help point (if they can use the help point) and then wait up to an hour for a mobile team to come out to meet them.”

Selina Mills, author of Life Unseen: A Story of Blindness (Bloomsbury), has spoken about how promoting her book involved a lot of travel – and the experience wasn’t a happy one. Mills cites the closure of ticket offices as a key problem.

“Navigating a Tube or train station without a fixed, known place for help is deeply distressing. Trying to find the right train can be terrifying. When I was travelling to London from Carlisle, they changed the platform three times. There was no one to ask where I should go at the ticket office. The change only appeared on the screens,” she says.

Mills has also encountered problems on the Tube: “I recently went around the Circle Line the wrong way because I had to ask a passenger, not a member of staff, if the train was going to Paddington. And they just thought, of course it is. And It did eventually. But whereas it should have been four stops and 10 minutes, it took me an hour and umpteen stops. By the time I realised I was going the wrong way, there was no point in changing.

“The problem with platform help points is you have to be able to find them to use them, and the buttons aren’t easy to use even if you do.”

Now let’s think of the Elizabeth Line. A staggering £18.9bn was sunk on London’s new east-to-west train service. For the want of what would amount to little more than a rounding error on that vast bill, it could be made fully accessible. And yet wheelchair users require 19th-century ramps to board trains at some stations – even at Stratford, which was the global focus of the 2012 Paralympic Games.

If there is no one around to assist, the disabled don’t travel. Last month, wheelchair user Katie Pennick tried to use the Elizabeth Line. “Eighteen billion spent on building it, and because the ticket office was closed today I couldn’t get on a train. Absolutely mind-boggling that this new line requires a manual boarding ramp and there are seemingly times where there are no staff.”

She wheeled around the station in search of assistance, checking both platforms and the concourse in a fruitless bid to find staff. Only when she pressed the “emergency” button on the disabled help point did someone emerge to help her. In the faff, she had missed several trains.

The Royal National Institute for the Blind says that there are “two million people living with sight loss… severe enough to have a significant impact on their daily lives” in the UK. So this is no small problem.

Mills, however, makes an additional important point: “Human contact, reliably found, is essential for independent travel.”

The closure of ticket offices will undoubtedly make people’s worlds smaller, restricting access to services, their ability to work and get out and about for leisure. It is a policy that will ultimately push those who have the option onto Britain’s already over-crowded roads.

How long must we wait until the rail minister realises he’s on the wrong track?

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