I am happy to be proved wrong, but I didnt think that TOC passes are valid for duty purposes where that involves train working.
Indeed the back of my TOC pass says ‘valid for unlimited free leisure, residential and duty travel on <My TOC> services’
It's operator specific. Quite a lot of train drivers and guards won't have DAT cards if their own trains are usually used and they already have their own duty card.
Is it clear? It looks like they were travelling for work and their employer decided to create fictitious duty rosters to avoid having to pay for their drivers to travel to medicals.
It doesn’t matter because it is one government department “stealing” from another government department. The net loss to the taxpayer is precisely zero. It is merely arguing about which cost centre the cost of travel should be applied to.
It isn’t, turning off Javascript is an entirely legitimate browser setting.
That might be true on a net financial basis for drivers, but they would have known they were failing to obtain tickets and expense them so had incentive to save admin time.
And actually every ticket not issued doesn't increase income, thus profitability of the private operators is reduced, and thus amount of Corporation Tax paid. So your statement is fundamentally wrong because of the tax implications.
It would have been true in the strictest sense on DfTO services, although that would only have been LNER and Northern for some of their tenure.
Only since 2020 does that apply. Before then the (privately owned/operated) TOCs were taking revenue risk i.e. they were paying premiums or receiving subsidy at fixed amounts to DfT. So this action by DRS was defrauding the private sector companies.
No. This is going back to when revenue risk sat with the TOCs, which were private companies, not government departments. It was the government stealing (there are no scare quotes required) from private companies. For some reason a lot of people on this forum don't seem to think this is an issue.
Yes, Duty Passes are paid for.
Revenue risk has never truly sat with the TOCs and, even if it had, no TOC in the history of privatisation has ever generated a net surplus to the taxpayer. All of them have always been subsidised.
No TOC has ever generated a net profit. All of them have been subsidised, right since day one.
Not when you factor in the hidden subsidies through the track access charging system they didn't. Same with GNER.
True or false: If the government company had paid for their drivers to travel to non-driving appointments, they would have made more money than they did when the government company was issuing fraudulent documents to allow the drivers to travel without charge?
False. Arguing about cost centres.
But in the argument of the subsidy coming from track access charges, if the ticket had been purchased the track access charges would still be the same but the TOC would have received £50 more from tickets.
In that scenario the franchisee fee may have had some revenue generating element to it in the contract, yes. It probably wouldn't have been any different from a few thousand pounds a year, but it could have been very slightly lower. So actually, DRS saved public money in that hypothetical scenario, and thus had a benefit and not a cost to the "taxpayer".
