Has claiming compensation on this matter worked before?
I have succeeded in claiming compensation for GDPR/DPA breaches on several occasions, yes. Not in relation to an irregularity or from a train company, but I do have a fair degree of familiarity with the law in this area.
I fully agree with the rest of your post but I am not persuaded by this - the train company have a legitimate interest in detecting and preventing fraudulent travel and require personal details to investigate individual incidents.
They would need to state that they are relying on 'legitimate interests' at the time; they cannot retrospectively change their lawful basis. Moreover 'legitimate interests' requires a balancing exercise where the individual's rights are balanced against the controller's interests. WMT do not appear to have conducted any such exercise, indeed their Privacy Policy sensibly doesn't try to rely on such a lawful basis for obtaining your name and address.
The fact it later transpires that the penalty fare was issued incorrectly doesn't mean the initial processing was unlawful. I think you would need an egregious mistake in the grounds for suspicion to get over this hurdle.
No Penalty Fare could have been issued lawfully because a valid ticket was shown - that would be the argument the OP would make. Moreover, even if the ticket was held to be invalid, the Regulations simply did not apply because the OP travelled on a CrossCountry service and so no Penalty Fare could lawfully be issued.
Even if this were deemed to be a breach, Article 82 claims are still very difficult to make out - whilst stress which exceeds the de minimis threshold can be compensable, in this case I think it would be a difficult argument that any stress arose from the breach of GDPR itself rather than from dealing with the penalty fare and associated legal action - and only the former is compensable under Article 82, even though one led to the other
The issuing of the Penalty Fare was predicated on obtaining the OP's personal data, so the stress was entirely a result of the unlawful processing. If the OP had not provided their personal details, there would have been no PF and thus no stress.
I disagree - the penalty fare was issued at the gateline, at a station that is served by operators who have penalty fare schemes. If saying you had travelled on CrossCountry were enough to make the suspicion unreasonable, everyone could deploy that argument as they travelled through.
The Penalty Fares Regulations do not allow a PF to be issued on grounds of suspicion. There needs to be actual ticketless travel, which took place on an operator participating in the Regulations (i.e. whose logo appears on a warning sign). Neither was present in this case and so it doesn't matter that someone else could have incorrectly claimed to have travelled on a different operator - that is a hypothetical which doesn't have any relevance to the OP's case.
The TOC is entitled to verify the claim made by the passenger and to process personal data for that purpose.
The OP presented a ticket for the previous day, which may or may not be valid depending on the circumstances - the NRCoT doesn't provide a clear-cut test here, so it will be judged on the facts - I do think that ambiguity should be resolved in the favour of the OP. I agree that if they had clearly arrived on CrossCountry, there would have been no reasonable grounds to obtain the details for the purpose of issuing a penalty fare (although they could process identical details to record a travel irregularity).
Unless I'm misreading the routing on the ticket, or I've missed something said earlier, it's entirely possible the OP travelled from Stockport via Crewe on a WMR service - in which case a penalty fare operator could have been involved. I appreciate that the OP has confirmed that they travelled on CrossCountry but at the gateline this was just an assertion.
If the inspector has suspicion, they are entitled to process the data for the purpose of investigation. The big gap in the system here is that the appeals process is meant to be where these issues get sorted out with the production of evidence - and it clearly hasn't done that job well in this case. But a failure at the appeal stage doesn't reach back and change the GDPR position at the gateline.
No personal details are needed to verify such claims - you first ask "where did you board the train?". As soon as the answer is Stockport, it will be either XC or Avanti the passenger travelled on, and so the PF regime is out of scope.
I reiterate the point that this was a PF and the Regulations do not give operators the power to require details to establish whether a PF is warranted. They only give that power if a passenger
actually fails to produce a valid ticket.
The suspicion doesn't become unreasonable in hindsight just because the passenger's account turned out to be true - at the time, it was an unverified assertion from the person under suspicion.
If WMT's inspectors had required the OP to provide their details under the Byelaws, that would be a different matter as this works based on reasonable suspicion. But they evidently did not; they cannot suggest that details obtained for the purposes of a PFN were actually obtained under the Byelaws. That's just not credilbe.
None of this changes the fact the penalty fare should have been cancelled, or that the appeals process sounds has been terrible. I just don't think GDPR is a particularly relevant angle to this case, and it serves to distract from the other issues.
I am not defending WMT here - they have behaved terribly and the inspector may well have deliberately manipulated the data to get the system to issue a penalty fare (a more generous interpretation is that the training they have is essentially "if you have a problem just pick a nearby station" - still wrong, but with a more innocent explanation). My point is purely around the GDPR angle which I don't think is a particularly strong one, in a case where there are much more favourable routes to arguing the matter.
I appreciate what you're saying but I think it is a worthwhile angle to pursue this from, because it is the only remotely plausible way to get any compensation for the failings in this case.
There is nothing to be lost by including it in the complaint and ultimately any Court claim, and everything to be gained. I'm not sure how it distracts from other issues; it instead builds on them. The ticket was valid -> no PF could lawfully have been issued -> GDPR was breached by unlawfully requiring details -> non-material damages are due for the stress caused by dealing with the unlawful PF.
The matter was handled using a PF. Having decided that course of action it would not be cannot try to claim that they were actually also requiring the details
I don't think we disagree on the facts here - the notice records data that's plainly wrong (Tamworth, "issued on train", "no ticket"). WMT have a case to answer on that, and they should correct what they're holding. We don't know whether it was a keying error, a system quirk or something worse (be it deliberate or just bad training). But that's an accuracy problem, and accuracy is a separate question from whether taking the details was lawful in the first place - Byelaw 23 gives them the express right to require a passenger's name and address if they reasonably suspect a breach. The grounds for that existed before anything was typed into the device - a ticket dated the previous day, presented at the gateline (
and the day-2 provision in the Off-Peak terms only applies where the timetable means the journey cannot be completed in one day - which doesn't seem to have been the case here). Whatever went wrong on the notice afterwards can't reach back and change that. If the OP wants to go down that route, they can contact the WMT DPO and ask them to rectify the data.
Rectification is a novel angle but given the point being made is that the whole Notice was unlawfully issued, I think asking for rectification risks giving it an air of legitimacy. Moreover the Regulations don't provide for PFNs to be changed after being issued.
See above re: the Byelaws.
WMT can be entirely in the wrong about what they recorded and how the appeals were handled, while still having been entitled to take the details at the gateline - and both things can be pursued, just not as one claim. The accuracy issue gets fixed by asking them to rectify the record; the issue with the Appeals Service goes to Transport Focus. What doesn't follow from either is a clear Article 82 claim, which is very challenging to demonstrate - the stress here comes from the penalty fare and the appeals process, not from the act of taking a name and address, especially when they could have collected identical details for a TIR anyway.
They didn't issue a TIR though - they cannot defend themselves based on the fact they might (or might not) have been entitled to use Byelaw 23. They didn't at the time and they therefore won't be able to retrospectively change their basis of processing.
