Delay repay compensation volume jumps 55% in a year

Tetchytyke said:

The political pressure was needed to make operators actually operate the service they said they would.

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No, it wasn't. There are vastly larger financial incentives that are automatic, immediate, and certain. Delay Repay is a drop in the ocean, especially when revenue risk (or even the operation itself) is wholly nationalised. DR15 came about as a political sop following the evil and naughty privately owned GTR having some awful performance. But who was actually responsible for most of that?


Oh look, it was actually publicly owned Network Rail who were found to be in breach of their licence.

(Note how the ORR suggested NR could pay the fine, or offer reparations to customers it delayed. What do you think it did?)

Tetchytyke said:

Back in the days when I was commuting into London from Hemel it was literally one trip in ten which arrived on time. A good half were heading towards 10-15 minutes late; LM had no financial incentive to fix it

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If they were responsible for the delays, yes they did, via delay attribution. This is mostly an industry assurance scheme but it is this which is front and centre of the TOC's mind alongside CaSL and PPM.

Delay Repay is not a mechanism to improve train performance or provide better service. It is almost never a consideration in operational decisions. DR15 has been around for 10 years now, and yet here we are in a thread talking about how the railway has paid out a fat ton of money because its performance was poor. Is it really an incentive?

We all love getting money back, but let's not kid ourselves that this is necessarily good policy.

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mmh said:

And in many jobs you'd be on your way to being dismissed. But that's fine, because it's the railway and you should leave the house earlier and wait around for an hour before work.

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£400 a year should make up for it then.

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Tetchytyke said:

Others have compared to the UK to other rail systems in Europe and used it to argue the UK is too generous. But I’ll tell you what: Deutsche Bahn wouldn’t offer such a terrible service if it cost them money when they delayed a train.

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DB is an operational basket case, a better passenger compensation regime there would not move the dial.

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Tetchytyke said:

As I’ve edited my last post to say, London Midland always had a fondness for cancelling the Tring terminators which, at the time, were the only trains to serve the smaller inner-WCML stations. Under the old system they had every incentive to do so: they saved the cost of running the train and the passengers left waiting had absolutely no recourse against them.

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That's right, there were no financial implications at all for cancelling the Tring terminators (!)

AlterEgo said:

If they were responsible for the delays, yes they did, via delay attribution.

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Delay attribution is a money-go-round, always has been, always will be. The TOCs have historically always done very well out of Schedule 8 payments.

AlterEgo said:

It is almost never a consideration in operational decisions. DR15 has been around for 10 years now, and yet here we are in a thread talking about how the railway has paid out a fat ton of money because its performance was poor. Is it really an incentive?

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It’s more of an incentive than it was before.

But if it isn’t an incentive, perhaps the payments back to passengers need to be increased until it is an incentive. Airlines only stopped playing silly buggers when EU261 came in and started hitting them in the wallet.

AlterEgo said:

DR15 came about as a political sop following the evil and naughty privately owned GTR having some awful performance.

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It wasn’t just GTR who, it turns out, were ripping off the taxpayer as well as their passengers.

And if Network Rail really are to blame then it doesn’t matter if Delay Repay goes up because Network Rail have already paid compensation to the TOC under Schedule 8. So why shouldn’t some of that Schedule 8 money make its way to the people actually affected: the passengers?

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AlterEgo said:

That's right, there were no financial implications at all for cancelling the Tring terminators (!)

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Nope, there weren’t. No financial consequences at all.

AlterEgo said:

So what is £2.72 going to do there then?

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A trivial amount of money, so yes, it'll do approximately nothing. Perhaps it would be better to refund 100% at a far shorter delay than now to make it less insignificant.

AlterEgo said:

Delay Repay is a drop in the ocean

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I agree, and have often said the same here. It'll be an insignificant amount of money and any fiddling with the current system on the grounds of cost would just be pointless tinkering.

AlterEgo said:

the railway has paid out a fat ton of money because its performance was poor

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So which is it? Is it an insignificant amount of money which should be scrapped as irrelevant, or a significant amount of money which should be scrapped as too costly? You seem to be suggesting it's somehow both.

Tetchytyke said:

Delay attribution is a money-go-round, always has been, always will be. The TOCs have historically always done very well out of Schedule 8 payments.

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This begs the question about whether you feel this Schedule is geared too strongly in favour of TOCs and whether the formula is correct (and how could you possibly know?).

Because obviously as it's compensation for a failure or acceptance of liability, surely it's not good faith to say they "do very well out of it" while arguing that delay repay is "not free money", it's compensation you the passenger are rightly due for bad service.

Tetchytyke said:

It’s more of an incentive than it was before.

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It's not. Never ever heard of it being the basis or even the consideration for any operational decision.

Tetchytyke said:

And if Network Rail really are to blame then it doesn’t matter if Delay Repay goes up because Network Rail have already paid compensation to the TOC under Schedule 8. So why shouldn’t some of that Schedule 8 money make its way to the people actually affected: the passengers?

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Train companies have to pay Delay Repay from their own revenues. Schedule 8 NR to TOC payments provide assurance only against the harm to future revenues and reputational risk caused by delays which were the responsibility of NR. If you want to argue for a different performance regime where Network Rail also pays delay repay to passengers (either directly or indirectly) then feel free to make an argument for it, but that is very different from what Schedule 8 actually is.

Tetchytyke said:

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Nope, there weren’t. No financial consequences at all.

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Makes you wonder why they ever ran the Tring trains at all. Just cancel half of them all the time then. No consequences.

mmh said:

So which is it? Is it an insignificant amount of money which should be scrapped as irrelevant, or a significant amount of money which should be scrapped as too costly? You seem to be suggesting it's somehow both.

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There are two aspects to DR15. Firstly the compensation due is generally quite small, but all Delay Repay has a processing and staffing cost. DR15 does generate a large volume of claims because this band of delay is the most frequently encountered as it is the least severe. Yes, much of this can be automated, but any such system will always need humans to be employed to look at appeals, and as a point of escalation before the Ombudsman gets involved. There's a fair amount of bureaucracy to support a scheme which does not really generate future business or keep existing business. Good customer relations should involve proper relationship building, not "press the button for two pounds you might notice in a week". Delay Repay almost never factors into any consumer decision to take the train.

AlterEgo said:

It's not. Never ever heard of it being the basis or even the consideration for any operational decision.

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Schrödinger’s Compensation: too small to be a financial incentive to improve performance, but too much of a financial burden to be allowed to continue.

AlterEgo said:

There are two aspects to DR15. Firstly the compensation due is generally quite small, but all Delay Repay has a processing and staffing cost. DR15 does generate a large volume of claims because this band of delay is the most frequently encountered as it is the least severe. Yes, much of this can be automated, but any such system will always need humans to be employed to look at appeals, and as a point of escalation before the Ombudsman gets involved. There's a fair amount of bureaucracy to support a scheme which does not really generate future business or keep existing business. Good customer relations should involve proper relationship building, not "press the button for two pounds you might notice in a week". Delay Repay almost never factors into any consumer decision to take the train.

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My decision to take the train will, generally, not be affected by past, present or potential future Delay Repay compensation. But, when I have been substantially messed about and I can claim some money back (automatically, as of right) it does make me feel slightly less annoyed. My overall perception or 'feel-goodness' of the railway is raised. Prior to Delay Repay (and its predecessor) you were entirely reliant on a railway person making an ex-gratia payment of whatever amount. Receiving nothing after being substantially messed around did not give rise to any 'feel-goodness'.

Tetchytyke said:

Schrödinger’s Compensation: too small to be a financial incentive to improve performance, but too much of a financial burden to be allowed to continue.

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You wrongly frame the two outcomes as mutually exclusive for a soundbite. The real bite is in the administration costs it imposes.

It is perfectly possible in straitened times for sums of money to be too small to generate a desired and measurable effect, and also justifiable for that spending to be cut.

This is before we get to, once again, the crux of the matter anyway: Delay Repay is not a performance incentive scheme for the train company, was never designed to be, and as a result there are no measurements taken against this metric.

AlterEgo said:

There are two aspects to DR15. Firstly the compensation due is generally quite small, but all Delay Repay has a processing and staffing cost. DR15 does generate a large volume of claims because this band of delay is the most frequently encountered as it is the least severe. Yes, much of this can be automated, but any such system will always need humans to be employed to look at appeals,

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The processing time ought to be the same if the delay is 5 minutes or an hour.

The railway chooses to make the system labour intensive, whilst manual processing of strange ticket types will always be needed, the vast majority of tickets have a bar code or ticket booking ref.

In theory if a customer puts in the reference or code number and their departure time, then system ought to be able to look up the first train, add minimum connection time, then take booked or next train, then repeat for subsequent connections against the real time database, to check arrival time vs planned arrival time.

Oddly the operators who don't have 15-30 minutes category are usually those with itineraries which are easiest to automate.

I suspect some appeals are due to not providing sensible cut offs on automation, system rejects because train log shows arrived 29.5 minutes late at platform, passenger claims 31 minutes because that includes stopping and door opening time

Snow1964 said:

the operators who have got rid of the 15-30 minutes category

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Which operators have got rid of that category? There are a number that have never had Delay Repay for sub-30 minute delays, but I don't believe any have had it and withdrawn it.

Snow1964 said:

The processing time ought to be the same if the delay is 5 minutes or an hour.

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Nobody is saying it isn't. But DR15 introduces, by volume, a much larger number of claims. If 1 in 100 claims need human intervention and you process 10000 claims a month, and suddenly you now need to process 20000 claims a month, that doubles the person hours required.

Snow1964 said:

Oddly the operators who have got rid of the 15-30 minutes category are usually those with itineraries which are easiest to automate.

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No operators have "got rid of" DR15.

I think we may be in for an unpleasant learning experience now we have an increasingly nationalised railway and the government cannot pretend to be hurting private companies in response to poor service standards any more.

Not surprised in the slightest.

Train delays and cancellations have been woeful this year. Particularly around Summer.

It seems every week trains are delayed, or cancelled for some reason, or another.

AlterEgo said:

So what is £2.72 going to do there then?

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It will put 50 kwh into my EV for another 225 miles of peak hour driving....

AlterEgo said:

Yes, much of this can be automated, but any such system will always need humans to be employed to look at appeals, and as a point of escalation before the Ombudsman gets involved.

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The railway has a large labour force doing nothing for most of the day in the form of ticket office clerks, which politics says must be kept. Could they get involved in helping with assessing claims and customer relations work, rather than staring into space or at their phone?

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AlterEgo said:

the government cannot pretend to be hurting private companies in response to poor service standards any more.

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This was the motivation for DR15. The Government pushed it as your chance to clip the wings of private fat cat operators.

Although I can think of people who if they knew Delay Repay was a rebate from the taxpayer it would motivate them to claim. Not everyone has the collectivist approach to public funds shown on here.