Do you actually have to make a journey by train to claim Delay Repay?

[AndyMe]

I hope this is the correct forum area for this question.

My daughter gets the same Southeastern train most school day mornings. Today, her usual train was cancelled. The next train, had she taken it, should arrive 15 mins after her usual train so Delay Repay would be claimable (it was 4 mins late as it happens). She has a season ticket on a Southeastern The Key.

She did not want to risk this next train also being cancelled or severely delayed so I drove her part way to school and she walked the rest.

Can I claim Delay Repay for her even though she didn't actually make the journey by train? (I must say, it sounds a daft question when I write it down, but I'm thinking how put out she was because of a cancelled train that would have allowed for a Delay Repay claim had she not made alternative arrangements for travel).

 

[221129]

Yes you do have to complete the journey. A claim in this scenario would be Fraud.

 

[island]

A DelayRepay claim would not be maintainable in this scenario. In the case of a single or return ticket a refund could be applied for in respect of the unused (portion of) the ticket.

You could always try emailing customer services and asking if they would issue compensation as per a 15 minute delay.

 

[Bletchleyite]

It is grossly annoying that for season tickets you can't claim anything for having not made a journey because of disruption - if it was a single or return ticket, you could get a refund.

However, unfortunately, yes the journey must be made to claim.

 

[furlong]

See https://www.southeasternrailway.co.uk/help-and-contact/help/delay-repay-compensation

If you arrive 15 minutes or more late at your destination because of a delay or cancellation to a Southeastern service, you can claim Delay Repay compensation.

Grey areas that the government and train companies seem unwilling ever to clarify. Do you consider that she in fact arrived at her destination more than 15 minutes late when you drove her part way? Presumably not, because of your intervention?

If you did put in a claim you should make sure you disclosed the full circumstances so they cannot claim afterwards that you misrepresented what happened.

 

[AM9]

It is grossly annoying that for season tickets you can't claim anything for having not made a journey because of disruption - if it was a single or return ticket, you could get a refund.

However, unfortunately, yes the journey must be made to claim.

That is part of the tradeoff for getting unlimited anytime travel including for aroun dthe price of an off-peak fare.

 

[AndyMe]

It is grossly annoying that for season tickets you can't claim anything for having not made a journey because of disruption - if it was a single or return ticket, you could get a refund.

However, unfortunately, yes the journey must be made to claim.

Thank you. I see what you mean Bletchleyite.

It got me thinking about abandoned journeys, which I have come across in this forum, and I think this would count as such.

It would seem from here Abandoned Journeys - Delayed or Cancelled Trains (item 2) that some form of compensation should be available even for a season ticket holder. However, looking at Southeastern's Passenger Charter a season ticket holder can only claim for an abandoned journey when Southeastern issues a Do not Travel advisory message.

It does seem wrong that if you make the journey you can claim Delay Repay but if you make alternative arangements, only because of the delay, you can't claim anything.

 

[island]

It is somewhat of a lacuna in the system I agree. As I mentioned above, you could consider claiming on a discretionary basis. Or, I suppose, under the Consumer Rights Act, if you were to show that the service had not been provided with reasonable care and skill.

 

[bakerstreet]

Thameslink actively tell you to apply for delay repay even under circumstances when there is ‘do not travel’ advice. I’ve posted the relevant Twitter post on the forum before although i can’t immediately locate it.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Thaneink actively tell you to apply for delay repay even under circumstances when there is ‘do not travel’ advice. I’ve posted the relevant Twitter post on the forum before although i can’t immediately locate it.

Presumably if you ignore that and do travel.

 

[bakerstreet]

Presumably if you ignore that and do travel.

No - if you do not travel.
Found it - note the link goes through to delay repay and you claim via delay repay.

 

[skyhigh]

Thaneink actively tell you to apply for delay repay even under circumstances when there is ‘do not travel’ advice. I’ve posted the relevant Twitter post on the forum before although i can’t immediately locate it.

Not quite. You can only claim if 'do not travel' advice is in place, you can't claim on a season ticket if you don't travel otherwise.

However, looking at Southeastern's Passenger Charter a season ticket holder can only claim for an abandoned journey when Southeastern issues a Do not Travel advisory message.

 

[bakerstreet]

Not quite. You can only claim if 'do not travel' advice is in place, you can't claim on a season ticket if you don't travel otherwise.

Quite right. But it’s interesting that this claim has to be made via delay repay which does send out a mixed message about what delay repay actually means to your average passenger.

I get that it’s only for when do not travel advice is given, but that is not made clear in that tweet.

So …don’t use delay repay if you don’t travel as that is not delay repay. Except use delay repay when we say don’t travel and put in a 120 minute delay - not because it represents your length of delay, because you weren’t delayed at all, but use 120 mins so that you get paid the right amount of money.

i am grateful for the compensation offered but the method is a recipe for confusion !

 

[FOH]

Must admit I was completely clueless about this limitation before reading this thread. Most likely I've done some of these in the past incorrectly then.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

Must admit I was completely clueless about this limitation before reading this thread. Most likely I've done some of these in the past incorrectly then.

Hopefully this wasn't in the Greater Anglia area.

 

[FOH]

Hopefully this wasn't in the Greater Anglia area.

Thankfully not

 

[island]

Thaneink [sic] actively tell you to apply for delay repay even under circumstances when there is ‘do not travel’ advice. I’ve posted the relevant Twitter post on the forum before although i can’t immediately locate it.

Thameslink is not Southeastern.

 

[bakerstreet]

deleted.

 

[Class800]

"Do you actually have to make a journey by train to claim Delay Repay?" - Potentially no, as if your train was cancelled, and replaced by a bus and you took the bus and were delayed, that would still count. But the journey has to be made. For non-season tickets, through a separate process, a refund can be sought for unused tickets, with the fee waived if it was due to disruption. For seasons, it works differently

 

[Watershed]

I don't think it would be correct to say you are automatically "SOL". Condition 32.1 of the National Rail Conditions of Travel (NRCoT) states:

32.1 If you are delayed in reaching your destination as a result of a delay or cancellation of a train service, you may be entitled to claim money back. You can make a claim in one or more of the following ways:

32.1.1. through the industry arrangements provided for:​

32.1.1.1. in these Conditions; and/or​

32.1.1.2. in the Passenger’s Charter of the relevant Train Company and/or​

32.1.2. by relying on your statutory rights, e.g. under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and the Rail Passengers’ Rights and Obligations Regulation as it applies in GB law.​

Note that the requirement is simply that "you are delayed in reaching your destination as a result of a delay or cancellation of a train service". I think that requirement would easily be met in the OP's titular example, even though they did not actually end up taking the train.

Of course, it gets more complex from there, because if you hold a season ticket, the arrangements referred to in 32.1.1.1 also lead you to the Passenger's Charter:

Although the amount of compensation offered varies by Train Company, if you arrive 60 minutes or later at your destination station, you will, as a minimum, be entitled to compensation in accordance with the table below:

...

Season Ticket: The discount or compensation arrangements in the relevant Train Company’s Passenger’s Charter apply

Therefore, if you wish to use 32.1.1 to claim compensation, you are reliant on what the Passenger's Charter of the relevant TOC says.

Southeastern's Passenger Charter provides that:

If you arrive at your destination station 15 minutes or more late, as a result of a delay to a Southeastern service you can claim compensation using Southeastern’s Delay Repay scheme, irrespective of the cause.

So again, there is no requirement to have waited for the next train, only that you arrived at your destination 15+ mins late.

Therefore, provided you submit an accurate claim (preferably using the freetext box to explain what happened), you should receive Delay Repay in exactly the same way as if you had waited for the next train.

 

[js1000]

Yes you do have to complete the journey. A claim in this scenario would be Fraud.

Feel your talking cross purposes here. If you don't make the journey at all (i.e. you never board a train OR arrive at the final destination) - then yes that is fraud. If a service is so bad in terms of punctuality passengers are having to make alternative transport arrangements to get to their destination then what is the point of Delay Repay? The whole point of the scheme is to reimburse passengers for inconvenience caused and to incentivise ToCs to improve punctuality.

If you make the journey via an alternative route or transport and would have still been 15 minutes late from original service then you still have grounds for claiming Delay Repay. Watershed's informative post above backs up my thinking on this as well insofar as if "you are delayed in reaching your destination as a result of a delay or cancellation of a train service" then you are entitled to claim DR. Nowhere does Delay Repay state you have to get THAT particular delayed service - or that you have to even get the train - only that you are delayed by more than 15 minutes by the time you reach your destination as a result of a train delay and/or cancellation.

 

[nlow462]

Feel your talking cross purposes here. If you don't make the journey at all (i.e. you never board a train OR arrive at the final destination) - then yes that is fraud. If a service is so bad in terms of punctuality passengers are having to make alternative transport arrangements to get to their destination then what is the point of Delay Repay? The whole point of the scheme is to reimburse passengers for inconvenience caused and to incentivise ToCs to improve punctuality.

If you make the journey via an alternative route or transport and would have still been 15 minutes late from original service then you still have grounds for claiming Delay Repay. Watershed's informative post above backs up my thinking on this as well insofar as if "you are delayed in reaching your destination as a result of a delay or cancellation of a train service" then you are entitled to claim DR. Nowhere does Delay Repay state you have to get THAT particular delayed service - or that you have to even get the train - only that you are delayed by more than 15 minutes by the time you reach your destination as a result of a train delay and/or cancellation.

I couldn't agree more.

 

[Starmill]

Northern asked people who had season tickets and hadn't travelled on strike days to use their delay repay form also.

I accept that that's not really a sustainable solution however. It caused confusion at the time too.

you can't claim on a season ticket if you don't travel otherwise.

I agree with those who suggest that some compensation is due but that it is not necessarily 'delay repay' compensation. Calculating how long you would have been delayed by had you travelled anyway and requesting an equivalent value in compensation is one reasonable request. There would probably be others.

 

[Bletchleyite]

To be honest I think it should be allowed if you finish your journey early due to a delay to claim DR as if you had travelled the complete journey, as that money can be put towards alternative transport such as a taxi. However, this isn't allowed officially as things stand, though I bet plenty of people do it and it isn't really detectable on paper tickets, and would take some digging (e.g. "were the barriers open at the destination") to detect it happening on an e-ticket.

 

[ainsworth74]

I hope this is the correct forum area for this question.

My daughter gets the same Southeastern train most school day mornings. Today, her usual train was cancelled. The next train, had she taken it, should arrive 15 mins after her usual train so Delay Repay would be claimable (it was 4 mins late as it happens). She has a season ticket on a Southeastern The Key.

She did not want to risk this next train also being cancelled or severely delayed so I drove her part way to school and she walked the rest.

Can I claim Delay Repay for her even though she didn't actually make the journey by train? (I must say, it sounds a daft question when I write it down, but I'm thinking how put out she was because of a cancelled train that would have allowed for a Delay Repay claim had she not made alternative arrangements for travel).

I travel with Northern so your mileage may vary! However, I use a season ticket (of either the weekly or longer variety) and also a flexi-season depending on how much I'm going to be using the train. In any event I use season tickets.

On several past occasions, both pre and post pandemic, I've had situations where having travelled to work by train the journey has been disrupted and rather than wait out for either the next train or for a replacement bus to rock up I have abandoned my journey got collected from a station short of my destination. I have also had cases where I've completely abandoned any attempt to travel by train (seen my train is cancelled and just driven to work instead). In both instances I have been compensated a few quid (it varies depending on the value of the season but I have no clue how they calculate the compensation value!) after emailing customer services.

Now I should say the first time I tried this way back in 2018 it did not go smoothly! It firstly took them four months to reply to my email (I must have lost track and forgotten to chase) and when they did reply they told me to claim Delay Repay. I pressed the issue pointing out that the National Rail Conditions of Travel state compensation is due for an abandoned journey (specifically condition 30 for which no exclusion for season tickets is listed and neither is one listed in Part F where special conditions for season tickets are listed) and Northern swiftly (to be fair) came back, apologised and issued me some compensation. The second time I tried this in 2019 I was directed to the Delay Repay team again and this time emailed them as directed. They wrote back to, politely, tell me that I was entitled to nothing as I have to complete my journey by train and that season ticket holders are, in any case, not entitled to anything like partial refunds or compensation for abandoned journeys in this situation. I complained and got a very apologetic response saying I had been wrongly advised to speak to Delay Repay and that further I absolutely was entitled to compensation and they would issue it ASAP.

I have since had no further issues whenever the need to claim has arisen. Whether that's because of some training that's been done or my copy book is marked I cannot say! Most recently this issue happened yesterday(!) my train home was cancelled so I arranged to be picked up from another station on a service which was going part way but not all the way to my home station. Northern emailed back a few hours later offering me £2.37 compensation.

So I would recommended emailing Southeastern customer services and asking for compensation for an abandoned journey, include a copy of the season ticket in question and see what happens. Certainly, unless expressly directed otherwise like in the examples above, I would not claim Delay Repay as you're not entitled to that and would resist any attempt by customer services to point you in their direction. But I do believe compensation is due.