If you want to know exactly how we as a people are being disrespected, disregarded and generally taken for fools, you need to look no further than the website of that instrument of government crapocracy, the Rail Delivery Group.
So how did the organisation that manages the nation’s rail network deliver the news that they are to close down almost every railway station ticket office in the land? “Train companies launch passenger consultation on plans to modernise customer service across the rail network,” read the headline on their website on Wednesday, when their plans became public. It would be difficult to find a more breathtaking example of egregious corporate sophistry, but there was more.
“Proposals mean more face-to-face support available across the network,” they also proclaimed. Really? In replacing people with machines, they expect us to believe that passengers will now find more rail staff willing and able to help them. Booking staff will transition into “multi-skilled ‘customer help’ roles”, we are told. Do us a favour. We know, and certainly the rail unions know, that this is a plan to reduce staff, and will cause, at least in the short term, more industrial friction and thereby inconvenience for passengers.
The unvarnished story is that, to save costs by government edict, almost all of the 1,007 ticket offices on the rail network are to be closed down within three years, but some will be gone by Christmas. We are told that the busiest stations will still be manned, but even Manchester Piccadilly, for instance, will lose its ticket office.
The Rail Delivery Group tells us in its own words that it is committed to improving the “ticketing experience” and points out that just 12 per cent of rail journeys today are undertaken with tickets bought at actual booking offices. In the year until March 2022, there were 990 million passenger rail journeys, 12 per cent of that figure translates to 119 million, so it’s not quite the obsolete “ticketing experience” we are being told it is.
Of those 119 million journeys, a good proportion are taken by the elderly and the disabled who require the support of rail staff to guide them through the often Byzantine complexities of pricing and ticketing, or by those who may not have access to the internet, or by those who simply feel safer and happier with a human-to-human interaction. No surprise, then, that disability and passenger groups, who only have 21 days to register their objections, have come out vehemently to oppose the plans.
There is almost nothing I can see to commend the Rail Delivery Group’s course of action, which represents another dispiriting example of how our formerly nationalised industries, now under private control, are being run primarily for their own interests rather than for the public good. Even on economic grounds, it is flawed, given that many old and infirm people will now be put off travelling by train.
Moreover, the cultural significance is huge. Of course, technology brings very real advantages both to businesses and consumers, but the benefits of commonplace human contact are often overlooked, particularly for those who feel disenfranchised and disadvantaged by the digital world. In other words, older people. If you accept that there is such a thing as society, it functions best when its purpose is to protect the interests of the less fortunate and able, and while the loss of railway ticket offices, and those who staff them, may be considered a relatively insignificant matter, it has real meaning for a lot of people. It’s not the thin end of the wedge, but the wedge itself.
Meanwhile, we are meant to swallow the tosh of the rail industry, represented by the Rail Delivery Group, whose corporate mantra is “Delivering Improvements in Customer Experience”. Improvements? Modernisation? Reform? It’s hard to escape the feeling that, in one sense at least, we are being taken for a ride.
Simon Kelner was editor-in-chief of The Independent and Independent on Sunday newspapers from May 1998 to 2008. He now writes a column several times a week for i
