By Cllr Jason Brock
Earlier this month, the organisers of a public consultation into plans to close hundreds of train station ticket offices were forced to extend the consultation period people by five weeks until September 1. If you – like Reading Council – feel this is short-sighted and wrong, I’d urge you to make your views known.
The Council has lodged its own objection to the proposals, which are put forward by the Government in conjunction with rail companies. Nobody knows better than local authorities the need to make tough choices on savings when needed, but it cannot be right when those choices so flagrantly impact on vulnerable people.
If you head to the GWR consultation page at www.gwr.com/haveyoursay you will find a list of stations, which includes Reading, Reading West and Tilehurst.
Each station has a handy summary of numbers of tickets sold at each station last year, numbers sold at concourse ticket machines and tickets booked online.
Take Reading Station, for example, where 45.8% of journeys commencing there were booked online. Another 29.8% of tickets were sold at vending machines.
On the face of it, you can see the argument. That is until you note that 24.4% of journeys from Reading last year were made with tickets sold at the ticket office – or an incredible 645,910 journeys.
As it stands, the proposals for Reading show an initial reduction in ticket office windows, followed by a full closure of the ticket office around September 2024.
Over at Reading West, 5,135 journeys were made with tickets bought at the ticket office last year. Under the proposals, it will shut permanently at some point between October 2023 and June 2024. At Tilehurst 18,035 tickets were sold at the ticket office last year, with that station’s windows also proposed to close later this year.
Don’t forget that the railways have not yet fully recovered from the impact of the Covid pandemic. It would be fascinating to see number of ticket office tickets purchased before Covid, as figures will of course be considerably higher. The closure of ticket offices seems like an odd way to go about encouraging folk back onto the railways.
Our chief concern is for travellers who have a disability, and particularly those who are visually impaired. The argument on the part of train companies is that rail tickets are all available through online booking or via ticket machines on the concourse.
That may well be true, but what’s also true is that not everyone is comfortable with using these alternative methods. For visually impaired passengers, the concourse ticket machines are not user-friendly, and I was interested to see talk of a legal challenge to the proposals on their behalf.
Most of us who have embarked on unfamiliar journeys will know well the feeling of utter confusion about which the best tickets are to buy and – importantly – which is the cheapest option available. For quite a few train journeys, especially long-distance ones, there are some complex routing options. But how many of us would be able to work that out for ourselves from a ticket vending machine? I know I wouldn’t feel confident without asking at a nearby ticket office window.
Similarly, some useful tickets – like many of the Rangers and Rovers that offer unlimited travel in a certain area for a day or more – are simply not available from a ticket machine.
That is magnified tenfold: vulnerable people or those with a disability for who ticket offices can be a crucial focal point to gain access to the railway where individual and specific needs can be discussed.
The Government’s Department for Transport knows full well there is an issue with rail ticket complexity and there is talk of introducing cheaper singles, but I would strongly argue this would have to happen before any ticket offices are closed for good.
And then there is the security element. Reading Station is of course one of the busiest, but there are also smaller stations in the area and visibility and access to staff is important.
Three of Reading’s four stations require a ticket to gain entry to the concourse and platforms where station staff would be redeployed. The reality is provision would be needed before passengers reach these barriers which may in turn require station redesigns to cope with queuing.
At a time when we should be encouraging train travel as a viable alternative to the private car, this is nothing but a retrograde step which creates additional barriers for vulnerable residents and those with a disability and just puts people off train travel.
If you agree with the Council, please take a minute to make your views known this summer. Ten of thousands have to date and you can do that at www.transportfocus.org.uk/train-station-ticket-office-consultation
Cllr Jason Brock is the leader of Reading Borough Council and ward member for Southcote
