Future of Ticket Office Consultations launched

[Geml246]

As the TSSA & RMT are now slagging each other off, TSSA accusing RMT of scuppering the deal that they had accepted, does someone have access to how may Ticket Office staff are in each Union, to put things into context ?

 

[Geogregor]

I don't have, and am not entitled to have, information on the salaries and other costs of booking office staff, so how am I supposed to give you a figure? I clearly can't. But clearly HMG thinks it will be a significant saving.

I'm not sure that savings are the main concern of the HMG here. The main focus is battle with the unions, which the government clearly wants to squash to irrelevance. And to be honest they will probably finally achieve it.

Since Covid railway strikes lost their potency. As soon as railway strikes are announced people who in the past would be screwed just choose to work those days from home. Especially affluent commuters in the southeast, which were the traditional Tory voters and whose opinion was (and to lesser degree still is) important for the Tory administrations. Rural voters (another important Tory constituency) drive anyway so they are not affected either. People who do suffer (builders, cleaners, retail workers etc. especially in urban areas) are not the people the government really care about.

So the most ticket offices will close. In some cases it will make sense, in many others it won't, but government will not care about opinions gathered during consultations or whether particular closure is logical or not. They will go ahead with the most extreme version of closures (and eventually destaffing) simply because they can do whatever they like, sensible or not.

Will we eventually end up with more efficient and better railways? I highly doubt it. The whole exercise is simply too quick. The TVMs shold be updated and ticketing system simplified before reducing staff who can actually help people to deal with the idiosyncrasies of British ticketing.

 

[WesternBiker]

...These should become "welcome centres", which sell rail tickets and provide information as a full service ticket office, but also bus tickets, book hotels and activities, call taxis and sell souvenirs as well as provide tourist information, and perhaps also sell basic refreshments though I accept Windermere is right next to Booths where these can be purchased, and Penrith right next to Maccy D's. If they did all of this they'd likely be profitable in their own right.

Similar arrangements would work well at the main non-commuter London termini like Euston, Paddington and St Pancras, and all airports. I'd even add one at Heathrow, which doesn't have a proper national ticket office.

That was pretty much the situation we encountered at Stockholm Central. No ticket office, but a well signed, centrally located tourist information counter, that could sell tickets for all services, (and with impressively multilingual staff). We used it to buy tickets for the regional Mälertåg, not wanting to download their app (their website says you can purchase tickets from the SJ machines, but we were told by the SJ assistance staff that we couldn't). In Uppsala, the station had a sort of travel centre for the City transport company, that could do the same.

Interestingly, in the course of several visits, there was never a queue at either, implying that the Swedes that have pretty much got used to functioning without ticket offices.

 

[sheff1]

TVMs are in effect now providing further reasons to keep ticket offices open,

Not at Meadowhall. I was walking past the ticket office the other day and thought I would purchase my Derbyshire Wayfarer there to give the two bored looking staff some business. "We can't issue those because they need special stock". I replied that was no longer the case* but they were insistent, so I went downstairs and bought one from the TVM.

I see Meadowhall ticket office is down for closure. Good riddance if this is their standard of 'service' - I certainly won't be going in again.

* I bought one at Bristol Parkway without difficulty a few months back.

 

[jon0844]

But of course, as has no doubt been mentioned previously, scores of stations are partially or totally unstaffed already, and have been for decades.

Not all stations are accessible but we've generally (as a nation) tried to adapt wherever possible, and TOCs now have mobile assistance teams to try and offer help at unstaffed stations. Likewise, they'll book taxis for people to/from certain stations - which must come at quite a high cost.

We can't make everything 100% accessible, but I think the UK has perhaps in many areas been ahead of some other countries in the world that took the 'what's the point spending money for a tiny percentage of disabled people'?

Problem is, I am sure we can all imagine that if this Government remained in power for another term or two, and lurched further to the right then we'd probably start to undo a lot of the work we've done. We'd relax rules and delay further changes, in the name of saving the economy, and we'd already be seeking to cut benefits to people with disabilities so only more well off people would have the means to get around, most likely in taxis.

Now you could perhaps rebuild stations, add in more help points, ensure you don't cave in to local residents moaning about the noise so you played clear announcements from first to last train, adapt platforms for level access, have every train with the accessible coach(es) in the same place and clearly marked areas that disabled passengers can go to, and probably loads more things, but does this sound like something the DfT is going to look to fun (which would be in the billions). It's as unlikely as making all trains driverless, which of course many people outside the rail industry seem to want (and would likely want in preference to putting more staff on a train to assist!).

Meanwhile, at my local station where they want to close the ticket office, you could perhaps argue that the local convenience store could sell tickets. When it first opened it was open from 5 or 6am to 11pm. Ideal place to help - just like kiosks abroad. Then it started to open later and closed at 9pm.

Today it closed at... Oh, sorry, it closed. Full Stop. Closed down. Now the station has no shop and nothing within about half a mile that could potentially take on the task of becoming an alternative (and that would only be for the ticket sales, not any of the other things a ticket office does - including assisting people).

Now imagine if the consultation wasn't about closing ticket offices because of the metric that more people buy tickets elsewhere (which is what they're going to do, and why they'll be able to force things through regardless) but looking at how to provide the same level of customer service and care but without doing it at a ticket office. Let's imagine they said stations would get kiosks that can sell food/drink and also deal with ticket sales, where rail staff can also reside to do assists, because it keeps staff busy when not doing maybe only a handful of assists per day, and can bring in revenue directly. Sure, they'd outsource the kiosk to SSP or whoever, but at least there'd be some logic - especially at the smaller stations.

The already totally unstaffed stations with a handful of people full stop each day aren't part of the consultation anyway, but you'd then perhaps look at how you can make them more accessible to - perhaps with mobile accessibility teams.

All that, to me, is a better way to consult and a way that won't take a giant **** on people with accessibility needs or wanting to speak to a real person about planning a journey or assisting with disruption etc.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 20 Jul 2023 ==

Not at Meadowhall. I was walking past the ticket office the other day and thought I would purchase my Derbyshire Wayfarer there to give the two bored looking staff some business. "We can't issue those because they need special stock". I replied that was no longer the case* but they were insistent, so I went downstairs and bought one from the TVM.

I see Meadowhall ticket office is down for closure. Good riddance if this is their standard of 'service' - I certainly won't be going in again.

* I bought one at Bristol Parkway without difficulty a few months back.

Sounds like the issue was the staff, not the ticket office. If they retrained the staff, you could use it again. Now you won't.

Not sure that's really a win for you?

 

[weeklycommuter]

It does because the court has to follow the legislation it can't make it up. The Section 29 rights\obligations are purely regards station infrastructure required to run a service. They are there to stop for example TOC A who are the station operator closing say the subway to Platform 3 at their station because they only use Platforms 1 and 2 thereby stopping TOC B who would use Platform 3 from using the station.

It is the wording of the legislation that is the issue.
29 1 (b) states This section applies where the station or, as the case may be, that part of it has, at any time within the preceding five years, been used for or in connection with the provision of services for the carriage of passengers by railway;
It could be argued that the sale of tickets at a ticket office is use in connection with the provision of services for the carriage of passengers by railway.
I do not know how a court would interpret this. The wording does not explicitly state that this only applies to the actual running of trains. The railway industry may read it this way but a court could take a different view.

 

[sheff1]

Sounds like the issue was the staff, not the ticket office. If they retrained the staff, you could use it again. Now you won't.
Not sure that's really a win for you?

Even if the office remained open they wouldn't retrain the staff though.
Many decades of dealing with Sheffield ticket office makes that clear - despite making written complaints the made up reasons for refusing to sell various tickets only increased rather than disappeared. Fortunately I can now avoid that ticket office for 95% of my tickets - if they would only install a Northen TVM (or sell Wayfarers online) I could add the final 5% - that would defintely be a win.

 

[tomuk]

It is the wording of the legislation that is the issue.
29 1 (b) states This section applies where the station or, as the case may be, that part of it has, at any time within the preceding five years, been used for or in connection with the provision of services for the carriage of passengers by railway;
It could be argued that the sale of tickets at a ticket office is use in connection with the provision of services for the carriage of passengers by railway.
I do not know how a court would interpret this. The wording does not explicitly state that this only applies to the actual running of trains. The railway industry may read it this way but a court could take a different view.

It can't be argued like that. A ticket office isn't required to be open to run services. The 8.30 from Glasgow Central doesn't stop at the ticket office it stops at the platform. You don't need to walk through the ticket office to get to the platform.

 

[Krokodil]

I'm not sure that savings are the main concern of the HMG here. The main focus is battle with the unions, which the government clearly wants to squash to irrelevance.

The attacks on the railways by the government are political, we always knew that.

That was pretty much the situation we encountered at Stockholm Central. No ticket office, but a well signed, centrally located tourist information counter, that could sell tickets for all services

You mean that even in Sweden they recognise that having a central point where passengers can find someone to speak to is a better idea than having a "journey maker" shuffling around a bank of TVMs? Well, well, well...

 

[jon0844]

You mean that even in Sweden they recognise that having a central point where passengers can find someone to speak to is a better idea than having a "journey maker" shuffling around a bank of TVMs? Well, well, well...

The same in Berlin, where I stayed at a hotel near a relatively quiet metro station and the local shop was also the place to get tickets from a person who could explain how they worked, what to buy, needing to validate or whatever.

 

[tomuk]

The same in Berlin, where I stayed at a hotel near a relatively quiet metro station and the local shop was also the place to get tickets from a person who could explain how they worked, what to buy, needing to validate or whatever.

There are half a dozen TFL Tourist Centres in London and you can top up your oyster etc at local corner shops, three to five thousand I think. On the mainline TfW have partnered with comer shops in South Wales to sell rail tickets.

 

[jon0844]

London was/is well ahead, but of course Oyster was also well ahead of its time. While considered limited and even flawed by today's standards, the zonal system in London rendered normal ticketing obsolete for most Londoners and visitors for around 20 years.

There are certainly things that can be carried over onto the national rail network, but also many many differences because the national railway network is NOT like London (or other big cities).

Ideally we'd be discussing the pros and cons of different systems to come up with a workable and fair system, but this isn't about doing that - it's closing offices wherever possible and reducing staff (either through redundancy or just not refilling posts when people leave/retire).

 

[janb]

Not at Meadowhall. I was walking past the ticket office the other day and thought I would purchase my Derbyshire Wayfarer there to give the two bored looking staff some business. "We can't issue those because they need special stock". I replied that was no longer the case* but they were insistent, so I went downstairs and bought one from the TVM.

I see Meadowhall ticket office is down for closure. Good riddance if this is their standard of 'service' - I certainly won't be going in again.

* I bought one at Bristol Parkway without difficulty a few months back.

To be fair the Derbyshire Wayfarer is a weird one. The official info on NR (from 2008!) is in line with Meadowhall. Now that TVMs sell them, more people will just ignore that I think, and somewhere like Bristol probably wouldn't have known in the first place.

Don't know if anyone else has mentioned previously on thread but more detailed stats for Meadowhall and other Northern stations have been made available on their website https://www.northernrailway.co.uk/sites/default/files/2023-07/Retailing Summary Document.pdf

 

[yorksrob]

There's been some discussion about "removing the glass panel" and having the clerk selling tickets at a desk.

Whilst this might seem more flexible, it strikes me that the traditional ticket office is actually better suited to flexible activities, at least at smaller stations. They allow the member of staff to sell any tickets, then when the time comes to assist passengers or undertake other tasks on the platform, they can safely lock up the ticket office, with computers, tills etc and go out onto the platform.

 

[Bletchleyite]

There's been some discussion about "removing the glass panel" and having the clerk selling tickets at a desk.

Whilst this might seem more flexible, it strikes me that the traditional ticket office is actually better suited to flexible activities, at least at smaller stations. They allow the member of staff to sell any tickets, then when the time comes to assist passengers or undertake other tasks on the platform, they can safely lock up the ticket office, with computers, tills etc and go out onto the platform.

Er, Windows-L and turn the key in the cash drawer?

 

[yorksrob]

Er, Windows-L and turn the key in the cash drawer?

Not sure I'd like to leave my computers and cash till out on a rowdy Friday night !

It seems to me that the miracle solution to modern flexible station staffing, allowing the equipment to provide specialist sales advice, and staff to go out to assist passengers is.......the ticket office !

 

[Bletchleyite]

Not sure I'd like to leave my computers and cash till out on a rowdy Friday night !

The ones at the Paddington assistance desks are.

 

[yorksrob]

The ones at the Paddington assistance desks are.

Do they handle cash transactions ?

 

[Bletchleyite]

Do they handle cash transactions ?

No, but a cash drawer is not particularly vulnerable if locked, the Saturday night revellers are hardly rocking up with angle grinders.

 

[yorksrob]

No, but a cash drawer is not particularly vulnerable if locked, the Saturday night revellers are hardly rocking up with angle grinders.

Whereas instead of going round locking drawers, fiddling with computers, hiding away things that may be grabbed etc, with a ticket office you just have one easy door to lock behind you !

 

[ChrisC]

Even if the office remained open they wouldn't retrain the staff though.
Many decades of dealing with Sheffield ticket office makes that clear - despite making written complaints the made up reasons for refusing to sell various tickets only increased rather than disappeared. Fortunately I can now avoid that ticket office for 95% of my tickets - if they would only install a Northen TVM (or sell Wayfarers online) I could add the final 5% - that would defintely be a win.

I’ve never been able to understand why the staff at the Sheffield ticket office have always been so uncooperative. Just down the line at Chesterfield and even more so at Alfreton I have always found the ticket office staff extremely helpful and willing to sell any combination of tickets I have asked for. All are operated by EMR and yet sadly Alfreton and Chesterfield are expected to close whilst Sheffield is to remain open. I quite regularly buy Derbyshire Wayfarers from Alfreton and it will be quite inconvenient if the ticket office closes and EMR do not make them available from the TVM.

 

[WesternBiker]

The same in Berlin, where I stayed at a hotel near a relatively quiet metro station and the local shop was also the place to get tickets from a person who could explain how they worked, what to buy, needing to validate or whatever.

That was the same in Oslo. But the key point is that most of the U-bahn (Underground) and many of the S-bahn (suburban rail) stations are completely unstaffed, with just TVMs - though they often have retail outlets like you describe, some of which can sell tickets.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 21 Jul 2023 ==

You mean that even in Sweden they recognise that having a central point where passengers can find someone to speak to is a better idea than having a "journey maker" shuffling around a bank of TVMs? Well, well, well...

Except it isn't a ticket office: it is a tourist information point, with a wide range of other services (with 3 staff) - in Sweden's busiest station. (And they weren't behind glass, either.)

They can sell tickets, but they can't help passengers with other needs. For those, there were a few (and I mean just a few) staff (SJ and the Arlanda Express) to help at TVMs and with things like accessibility. Most of the stations we used had no staff at all (though weirdly the metro retains a member of staff at a gateline kiosk in some of the central stations).

Overall, I think that means you can argue it both ways: that it argues for retaining a central point is helpful; or that Swedes have adapted to the extent where a conurbation of c. 2.5 million has a single multi-purpose counter in its busiest station with just 3 staff.

 

[weeklycommuter]

It can't be argued like that. A ticket office isn't required to be open to run services. The 8.30 from Glasgow Central doesn't stop at the ticket office it stops at the platform. You don't need to walk through the ticket office to get to the platform.

This is the statement on the Greater Manchester Combined Authority website.

Home

Mayors initiate legal process with deadline for rail companies to halt ticket office consultation

www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk

It remains to be seen what if anything happens as a result. Ditto the following

Disabled people launch legal challenge against consultation of rail ticket office closures | Disability Rights UK

www.disabilityrightsuk.org

 

[yorksrob]

This is the statement on the Greater Manchester Combined Authority website.

Home

Mayors initiate legal process with deadline for rail companies to halt ticket office consultation

www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk

It remains to be seen what if anything happens as a result. Ditto the following

Disabled people launch legal challenge against consultation of rail ticket office closures | Disability Rights UK

www.disabilityrightsuk.org

Good. The more pressure the Cities can exert against Westminster, the better.

 

[VItraveller]

Looks likeDoug Paulley, of first group Fame, has launched a legal challenge.

Activists launch legal action over ‘woefully inadequate’ ticket office consultations

Disabled activists have launched a legal action against four train companies and a government minister over a series of “woefully inadequate” public consultations that will lead to the closure of n…

www.disabilitynewsservice.com

 

[317 forever]

This just reminded me of a time I put in the booking reference and the machine said "Unable to issue please go to the ticket office" half way through the printing process.

No idea what would have happened if there was no ticket office. I resolved not to use that particular station/TVM combination again.

I met with that scenario at Heaton Chapel last December early that morning before the ticket office had opened.

I showed my ToD reference printout and he accepted it as genuine. At Manchester Oxford Road they let me out to access the ticket machine to print my tickets there. (This was on the final day of through trains from Heaton Chapel beyond Piccadilly).

Admittedly I have now accepted E-tickets as standard rather than ToD.

 

[Andyh82]

I was in Windermere the other day - successive trains seemed to have been P coded with a rail replacement bus in operation and for some reason the ticket office was closed.

Foreign tourists were just left to roam about outside not having a clue what was going on. Not knowing the geography, or the difference between a Stagecoach service bus and a replacement bus and then not understanding that a coach driver knows absolutely nothing about anything bar that he’s been told to drive from A to B as per his docket and they were disrupting his fag break.

Presumably this will be the future when the station becomes staffed only about 3 hours a day.

Ideally at somewhere like this the ticket office would have been modernised, remove the glass so it’s more of a help desk and also ideally make it so it could answer bus queries as well, as there is a lot of confusion and lost tourists in general in this area.

I suppose the issue is that many of these tourists won’t have needed tickets, they probably had returns from wherever they’d started out, so in the figures, the ticket sales will be poor.

 

[jon0844]

Until the Government acknowledges (what it already knows but won't say) that ticket offices aren't just about selling tickets, all of these debates are pointless I fear.

They have an agenda. They've made it clear that we need to 'modernise', which in every other instance of that word being used usually means cutting jobs, and they're going to press on. Just as they're going to seek to reduce train frequencies, and possibly even train lengths, to set us going backwards from before all the big timetable recasts of 2018 - even as passenger numbers continue to grow and more businesses are getting their staff back into offices almost all five days a week (and of course where there's flexibility, many people who have worked from home are choosing to go back to an office just to get out of the house).

It isn't quite to the level of the Beeching cuts, but it is not that far off - just a longer process. Stations and lines aren't closing over this, but there are things happening that will potentially stop people travelling as much - so if kept in power long enough, it won't be long until it can be argued there are now some stations that don't have the numbers to warrant staying open or having trains call there. Then it becomes the same race to the bottom as how the bus industry kills itself by reducing service frequencies and then arguing that nobody is using their bus(es).

 

[Topological]

I was in Windermere the other day - successive trains seemed to have been P coded with a rail replacement bus in operation and for some reason the ticket office was closed.

Foreign tourists were just left to roam about outside not having a clue what was going on. Not knowing the geography, or the difference between a Stagecoach service bus and a replacement bus and then not understanding that a coach driver knows absolutely nothing about anything bar that he’s been told to drive from A to B as per his docket and they were disrupting his fag break.

Presumably this will be the future when the station becomes staffed only about 3 hours a day.

Ideally at somewhere like this the ticket office would have been modernised, remove the glass so it’s more of a help desk and also ideally make it so it could answer bus queries as well, as there is a lot of confusion and lost tourists in general in this area.

I suppose the issue is that many of these tourists won’t have needed tickets, they probably had returns from wherever they’d started out, so in the figures, the ticket sales will be poor.

The Windermere example is surely more of a case for a community hub than it is for the retention of a ticket office? Presumably these same tourists would benefit from information about the area beyond the railway.

There is then the question of who is best placed to provide such hubs, but it is probably local government rather than the railway.

The hub can be equipped with computers to allow those who wish to book online to do so, as well as many other functions that will help tackle digital exclusion in rural areas. For example banking, bill paying etc., all of which offer insufficient savings to one agency to merit the provision of a hub, but collectively have sense.

There has been much above about a role for the post office, maybe that is the right provider.

We need to see more creative solutions, rather than presuming everything railway has to be done by a dedicated ticket office.

 

[WesternBiker]

I was in Windermere the other day - successive trains seemed to have been P coded with a rail replacement bus in operation and for some reason the ticket office was closed.

Foreign tourists were just left to roam about outside not having a clue what was going on. Not knowing the geography, or the difference between a Stagecoach service bus and a replacement bus and then not understanding that a coach driver knows absolutely nothing about anything bar that he’s been told to drive from A to B as per his docket and they were disrupting his fag break.

Presumably this will be the future when the station becomes staffed only about 3 hours a day.

Ideally at somewhere like this the ticket office would have been modernised, remove the glass so it’s more of a help desk and also ideally make it so it could answer bus queries as well, as there is a lot of confusion and lost tourists in general in this area.

I suppose the issue is that many of these tourists won’t have needed tickets, they probably had returns from wherever they’d started out, so in the figures, the ticket sales will be poor.

Surely the answer in this particular case is to have staff (who are easily identifiable) to help/direct people to the replacement buses? That’s what I’ve always encountered during bus replacements elsewhere (albeit at largeish stations, but I’d have thought Windermere would justify at least one such person)?