Begging getting more common on the railway?

[Thirteen]

I guess they are cheap to buy in bulk, non-perishable, not breakable, not too heavy or bulky to carry around all day.

You can get good deals in supermarkets, I got a pack of six for just over a pound.

 

[Robert Ambler]

The official method of calculating poverty is this:



So, it's almost impossible to change. Increase wages, but then the average increases and you still have people earning less than average salary. Intervene on housing costs and it distorts the market with some higher income families benefitting and increasing the median household income after housings costs.

Any politician, organisation, or charity that promises to "eradicate poverty" either doesn't understand how poverty is calculated or is deliberately trying to mislead you.

The only thing that can really be done is to change the way the poverty is calculated to take people out of poverty or to provide targetted support to mitigate against the consequencies of poverty.

Your are correct on the calculation method for poverty but incorrect in saying there is nothing anyone can do about it. The figure for the UK is higher than for most other European Countries (including non EU countries such as Russia at 12%) and in quite a few cases the figures for other countries is in the low single figures using the same basis. The % figure for Iceland is I believe zero if you use the same calculation method!

Of course the UK does do OK if you use a measure such as % of population surviving on less than $5 US per day or GDP per capita!
It is of course all statistics that can be manipulated to give the answer you want

 

[ainsworth74]

Had one like that in Nottingham bus station years ago. Guy wanders up to me with a sob story and needs 50p to have enough to buy a bus far back home to Leicester. Sorry mate, can't help.
The very next week the same guy. Needs 50p for his bus fare back to Derby. "Oh, you must have moved, you were living in Leicester last week". "YEAH WELL, some things have changed since then, like the effing weather..." just walked off as he ranted.

At least my fella at Middlesbrough station is always trying to get to Northallerton so is at least keeping his story straight! Then again he didn't seem to appreciate me pointing out that I'd seen him four or five times now trying to get to Northallerton "No you haven't", "I definitely have mate!", "Nono why are you lying you haven't seen me here before" as the crowd of people who had just gotten off the train quickly moved past costing him at least one opportunity to get money out of people

 

[BJames]

Selling packets of tissues on trains?? Never seen that before! Why tissues? Why not something of more value?

It does seem that this is much more of a London thing then as I've known this to be going on for many years now. A quick google search shows news articles from a couple of years ago about this, as well as reddit threads dating back to 2014 and before, but all seem very London-centric.

Definitely. Legally, businesses still have to accept cash as its legal tender but may refuse to serve you and as they probably won’t have any change, unless you have the exact amount you will have to pay over.

Some small privately owned shops and many hairdressers still don’t accept cards. A lot of them prefer people to pay in cash becuase there is a small processing fee to pay on each transaction. For this reason some shops do not accept cards for purchases less than 2 or 3 pounds. My mum told me she went into a shop recently and they actually offered a discount to people who pay in cash!

Without dragging this off topic too much I do just want to respond to this. Unfortunately, this is incorrect. This has been debunked by the Bank of England here, with the key part as follows:

You might have heard someone in a shop say: “But it’s legal tender!”. Most people think it means the shop has to accept the payment form. But that’s not the case.

A shop owner can choose what payment they accept. If you want to pay for a pack of gum with a £50 note, it’s perfectly legal to turn you down. Likewise for all other banknotes, it’s a matter of discretion. If your local corner shop decided to only accept payments in Pokémon cards that would be within their right too. But they’d probably lose customers.

Legal tender has a narrow technical meaning which has no use in everyday life. It means that if you offer to fully pay off a debt to someone in legal tender, they can’t sue you for failing to repay.

As frustrating as it is, this does mean that a business choosing not to accept cash is not legally in the wrong. A petition was started to get the government to legally mandate the acceptance of cash but they stated that they did 'not plan to mandate cash acceptance' (source: https://fullfact.org/online/legal-tender-cash-in-shops/).

 

[Thirteen]

Have to admit, if anyone tried buying a pack of gum with anything lower than a fiver, I think they're scamming.

 

[75A]

In this country cash is still very much king.
Friends of ours run a Hotel/Pub/Restaurant and actually have a notice up saying cash is preferred, the main reason being if a card is used the machine provider takes 3%

 

[scrapy]

Had one like that in Nottingham bus station years ago. Guy wanders up to me with a sob story and needs 50p to have enough to buy a bus far back home to Leicester. Sorry mate, can't help.
The very next week the same guy. Needs 50p for his bus fare back to Derby. "Oh, you must have moved, you were living in Leicester last week". "YEAH WELL, some things have changed since then, like the effing weather..." just walked off as he ranted.
Many years ago walking to Leeds uni campus for an open day. I would have been 17 or 18. Walking on a bridge over a dual carriageway, this tough little kid with a shaved head comes over, he must have been about 10 or 11. "Hey mister, give me a pound" "No" "Err, YES, give me a pound NOW!". Actually started following me for a while!

At Southport station I witnessed a guy claiming to be £2 short of a train fare home to Wigan. Merseyrail staff approached him and offered to ask the guard if they could sell him a ticket for around £6 instead of about £8 which the single fare was at the time(Probably a Burscough to Wigan ticket or something similar), so the beggar would stop hassling the public. Needless to say the beggar decided he no longer needed to travel home to Wigan and disappeared.

 

[gg1]

A year or two ago at Euston I was approached by a man who showed me what appeared to be a nasty looking leg wound and asked for money for train fare home. That fact he wanted to go home rather than seek medical treatment was a major red flag, googled it when I got home and found a Reddit thread about him, he was a regular at other London stations using exactly the same script he told me.

 

[Thirteen]

A year or two ago at Euston I was approached by a man who showed me what appeared to be a nasty looking leg wound and asked for money for train fare home. That fact he wanted to go home rather than seek medical treatment was a major red flag, googled it when I got home and found a Reddit thread about him, he was a regular at other London stations using exactly the same script he told me.

Have to admit, anyone who has a nasty leg wound and is able to walk perfectly well with it would signal to me it's a scam!

 

[gg1]

Have to admit, anyone who has a nasty leg wound and is able to walk perfectly well with it would signal to me it's a scam!

That too, though I didn't see him walking until afterwards.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

Have to admit, if anyone tried buying a pack of gum with anything lower than a fiver, I think they're scamming.

What? Like trying to pay for the gum with a £1 coin?

 

[YorksLad12]

Selling packets of tissues on trains?? Never seen that before! Why tissues? Why not something of more value?

Have you seen the ticket prices? They'd bring a tear to anyone's eye.

How about the equivalent of a permit to travel? Give a valid name and address / email address, and be issued with a ticket to get you home. You then have 14 days to pay up. Yes, it can and will be abused, but if someone says "I need £2 towards a ticket home", you can take them to the ticket office (if it's open / the Government hasn't closed it) and call their bluff with an actual way to get them home that costs you nowt. I'm sure buses used to do that, back in the day.

 

[island]

Legally, businesses still have to accept cash as its legal tender

No they don't

Some small privately owned shops and many hairdressers still don’t accept cards. A lot of them prefer people to pay in cash becuase there is a small processing fee to pay on each transaction.

The fee for businesses to pay in cash into banks is close to the same if not more in some cases.

My mum told me she went into a shop recently and they actually offered a discount to people who pay in cash!

That's illegal.

 

[Sonic1234]

You don’t have a ticket and are risking a penalty fare which would leave you with even less money to put towards the shelter

And how enforceable is a penalty fare against someone claiming to have no permanent address?

 

[Kite159]

That's illegal.

Or most likely a shop which prefers payment in cash so they don't declare all sales made that day for purposes of tax.

 

[Sunil_P]

When I did the new Edinburgh tram extension to Newhaven in July, when I got back to Waverley station, I was approached by a young-ish bloke with an east European accent saying he was short of money, and asking if I could give him £20. I told him I was out of work for five years, could he give me £20 instead. And he actually offered! I politely declined

 

[al78]

In my experience beggning has got worse (more frequent). I rarely experienced it a decade ago whenever I had to go to London but it happens frequently on my twice weekly commute now. I couldn't give them anything even if I wanted to as I don't generally carry cash, a side effect of the pandemic.

 

[Gerald Fiennes]

Definitely more than before C19 (and there was a fair amount then) on SE inners, TL and London Overground South of the River, but not so much on Southern (inners). Those that are clearly very troubled or who are struggling to walk or go up steps due (presumably) to drugs I will sometimes report to BTP non-emergency number, for what it's worth. Certainly also quite common for beggars to use the emergency doors on the tube to get in front of more people. I suppose if BTP wanted to put resource on it, it could get the CCTV pictures if I alerted them but I presume it's just not something that they can tackle. My sense is that BTP presence at the major termini is somewhat reduced these days....

 

[dk1]

.

Or most likely a shop which prefers payment in cash so they don't declare all sales made that day for purposes of tax.

Always puts me off in a way.

 

[LUYMun]

Have you seen the ticket prices? They'd bring a tear to anyone's eye.

Bravo

 

[Peter0124]

I get around the network quite a lot, and begging at larger stations is very common everywhere, but I only seem to ever see begging actually on the trains when I get within about 30 miles of London.

Ive been begged for Greggs before at Manchester Piccadilly, as I was feeling a bit under pressure I bought the guy something. He had all black stuff on his hands and was probably homeless.

 

[lxfe_mxtterz]

I certainly feel that begging on trains has gotten worse. Encountering a beggar used to be a relatively rare experience for me, however as of late I have been encountering quite a few - including a the traditional pot-jangling beggars on the London Underground, and a tissue beggar on South Western Railway between Waterloo and Woking.

In the latter case, the guard kicked the beggar off at Surbiton, only for him to walk one carriage back and reboard the train. A few hours later at Woking, I saw the exact same beggar on a different train heading towards Waterloo, and he gave me a filthy grin and a little wave as the train left the station.

 

[Stampy]

It's not only on the trains - the local "beggars" here in Peterborough have now taken to sitting with the "said sign" in the shelters where the car-park ticket machines are...

"Help a weary traveller get home, mate??"

 

[Krokodil]

Weirdly the only places in London I never see beggars on public transport is the DLR which considering there have no barriers is strange

I don't think that's surprising at all. It's the only part of TfL where there's an equivalent of a guard patrolling the train.

I suspect the most gullible people likely to be convinced to give money to obviously organised beggars and con artists are also the ones who believe the conspiracy theories about the Government trying to take away cash, and are therefore going to be refusing to switch to cards. So the 'marks' will still have cash to give.

Certainly seems to be the case as plenty of people give money still. Or perhaps people just keep a small bit of cash on them (a smart move for everyone) and feel they can give it up as they aren't using it normally.

The most gullible people will include tourists (who often carry cash, though global money cards are becoming more common), and drunks (who may use cash to prevent overspending on a night out).

The tissue sellers are no difference to the flower sellers in Oxford Street or the scammers on various London bridges doing card games. If you live and work in major cities, it's very easy to develop a do not trust anyone attitude although I do that with the chuggers as well!

This never gets old:

Legally, businesses still have to accept cash as its legal tender

The concept of "legal tender" is only relevant in terms of what you have to accept for repayment of a debt. Otherwise a business can choose to only accept magic beans.

Your are correct on the calculation method for poverty but incorrect in saying there is nothing anyone can do about it. The figure for the UK is higher than for most other European Countries (including non EU countries such as Russia at 12%) and in quite a few cases the figures for other countries is in the low single figures using the same basis. The % figure for Iceland is I believe zero if you use the same calculation method!

Of course the UK does do OK if you use a measure such as % of population surviving on less than $5 US per day or GDP per capita!
It is of course all statistics that can be manipulated to give the answer you want

The thing is that the 60% derived statistic doesn't actually measure poverty, it measures inequality. A measure of poverty would be measured against a defined standard, not a moving one. This standard might consist of a list of "essentials" that lack of would indicate poverty.

 

[Thirteen]

What? Like trying to pay for the gum with a £1 coin?

I meant to say higher than a fiver!! Brain wasn't working when I typed that!

 

[Tracked]

Looked at this Thursday afternoon and the same night I was in the main bus station in Doncaster and a couple were going around asking for Bus Fare Home

Used to them usually being outside the railway station, or in town. Don't think it's gotten worse than before Covid, it always used to be bad; I'd be going in to get the 05:58 to STP and most mornings there'd often be a beggar outside both doors and one just before the station buildin in the new extension to the bus station/shops.

Rarely saw beggars on the train, haven't in the last 3 years.

 

[Merle Haggard]

You can get good deals in supermarkets, I got a pack of six for just over a pound.

I don't think these dishonest beggars would spend much time searching the best offers, they'd just stuff then in pockets and walk out...

 

[Falcon1200]

I have only encountered beggars on trains in the London area, including the tissue sellers, both on the Underground and National Rail. My most frequent journeys by far are in Scotland, and I have never seen them on trains here (the streets of Glasgow are a different matter however....)

 

[stuu]

I meant to say higher than a fiver!! Brain wasn't working when I typed that!

Why would paying for something cheap with say a £20 be a scam? I have had to do that loads of times to get e.g. change for parking (not lately obviously)

 

[Turtle]

East Croydon - Clapham Jn has been bad for years. You also used to get them on the exit from Victoria heading towards the Coach station, asking for Travelcards that were done with. This seems to have disappeared with the drastic reduction in paper ticket use.

I remember that at Victoria. Quite common at certain times of the day.