Future of Ticket Office Consultations launched

[northwichcat]

Nobody at all will be using ticket machines, whether TVM or at a ticket office window in a very short space of time. The stations will be boarded up eventually or repurposed as commercial/leisure/retail opportunities as appropriate, or just used as storage.

Not even tourists? Every time I'm in London I still see tourists buying or using paper travelcards, especially those from non-EU countries who may not have a suitable bank card to use for contactless.

On the first on, I suspect most people are buying railcards online already, partly because you can buy them using Clubcard vouchers. Equally a number of the railcards can be provided electronically - so why bother going to a station to buy an electronic download?

Why would most people use Clubcard vouchers? Some towns don't have a Tesco store and other people prefer to shop at other supermarkets, so a lot of people won't build up many Clubcard points. Tesco has a 27% market share in groceries, so I'm not sure you can argue it's significant in which method of delivery people choose for railcards.

If 10% of people prefer paper tickets from the ticket office and many more buy paper tickets from the TVMs, wouldn't logic suggest that a number of people don't want the electonic option if a paper option is available?

On electronic refunds - no reason for them to take weeks. I recently cancelled a ticket bought through an app recently due to strike action and the refund was back with me in 48 hours.

But one purchased at a station TVM would take longer to refund online, as it would require manual intervention. I'd be surprised if you've never experienced a delay in either trying to get a refund or Delay Repay.

 

[A0wen]

The railway has already modernised by providing new ways to buy tickets and travel such as online, contactless and so on. That is modernisation but does not mean that other ways of retailing should be discarded. Should cashiers in Supermarkets also be done away with so we can all use the self-service tills for our weekly shop, in the name of modernisation?

If it's simply cost-cutting then call it that, plain and simple. It's also funny how people choose to describe the railway as a 'business' when it suits them, and as a 'service' when they have a different agenda to promote. No doubt if you consider the railway purely a business then it should have shut down during Covid?

If you go back 70 years when you went into a shop, you didn't have 'self service' of the goods - you had a person behind the counter who picked what you wanted. Now, 70 years later you walk around the store and choose the items you want. As recently as 20 years ago you probably paid for a large supermarket shop using a cheque - try doing that now.

If, ultimately, fewer and fewer people use the staffed checkout, then yes, they will disappear. There are a few issues in that supermarkets do sell age controlled goods - which is why there will always need to be some staffing on hand. Good as machines are they can't yet verfiy that somebody is over 18 when they're trying to buy 2 dozen Smirnoff Ice, 20 Benson & Hedges and a kitchen knife.

 

[willgreen]

To be fair any organisation that provides a product or service can be termed a business, or doesn’t need to be profit making. The funding, corporate structure and objectives don’t really matter.

I don't agree - basically every organisation provides a service (is the DVLA a business to take a random example?). In any case, though, if every organisation is a business then the point about the railway being a business is essentially irrelevant. The railway is at the very least a primarily state-funded and state-organised business and thus is a public service business, if you will, but the initial point from AOwen compared it to the Co-Op - evidently a completely different form of business.

 

[Msq71423]

For reference, has anyone compiled anywhere a list of ticket offices across the country that *will* stay open?

 

[henryb]

GWR do in theory sell rovers/rangers on line but only with postal delivery and a compulsory £7.50 fee for next day delivery so not an attractive option.

Not quite sure what you are supposed to do if you want one at Newton Abbot, a station with barriers….

 

[Noodle]

Thoughts go out to everyone affected by this, tough time.

 

[Goldfish62]

It cant be cost cutting if they are going to retain the staff so will need to leave the facilities open and maintained and heated. If anything its one more excuse not to buy a ticket and with revenue protection non existent on my DOO railway even more lost income to the industry.

To my mind they should be put on the trains to check and sell tickets.

There'll be a software and hardware cost saving from no longer having to maintain ticketing equipment, but that's got to be peanuts.

For my local SWR station the staffed hours are being cut back drastically. Replicate that across much of the network and that's where you'll get your savings. Plus once ticket offices are closed it'll be so much easier to cut back further on staffing in the future...

 

[willgreen]

You're not understanding it - the serivce is transport. Rail is simply a way that serivce can be delivered, in the same way a bus, car, plane or boat are transport. And there are direct competitors to rail now. That's why rail isn't a monopoly.

The supermarkets offer something "different" - be it convenience i.e local a 2 minute walk from your front door or large scale store with huge range. They are still a shop sellling a pint of milk though. A bus is transport, a car is transport, rail is transport. That's why rail isn't different or special, it's simply providing a transport service.

A transport service is still different to a food service, though, and the comparison is therefore inadequate - unless you don't support the concept of public transport.

 

[northwichcat]

If you were travelling from Barrow to Euston, every other station is planned to have no physical ticket office. I believe this is even true going via Brum (not had a chance to check WMR operated stations).

It doesn't work via Manchester or via Birmingham.

Both Manchester Piccadilly and Stockport ticket offices are closing.

Wolverhampton ticket office is supposedly closing, but it's to become a customer service hub (whatever that means). Birmingham New Street ticket office is closing.

 

[A0wen]

Why would most people use Clubcard vouchers? Some towns don't have a Tesco store and other people prefer to shop at other supermarkets, so a lot of people won't build up many Clubcard points. Tesco has a 27% market share in groceries, so I'm not sure you can argue it's significant in which method of delivery people choose for railcards.

I suspect there are fewer towns without a Tesco than without a railway station........

 

[northwichcat]

As recently as 20 years ago you probably paid for a large supermarket shop using a cheque - try doing that now.

What absolute rubbish. 20 years ago was 2003. You paid by debit card using a signature -chip & pin was introduced just under 20 years ago!

 

[12LDA28C]

Nobody at all will be using ticket machines, whether TVM or at a ticket office window in a very short space of time.

This is literally rubbish. According to some figures quoted from the TOCs themselves for example GWR, some stations see 30 or 40% of ticket sales carried out at the ticket office. Again, it's simply cost-cutting which is driving this, not a genuine desire to make things easier or more convenient for people travelling on the railway.

 

[A0wen]

What absolute rubbish. 20 years ago was 2003. You paid by debit card using a signature -chip & pin was introduced just under 20 years ago!

Nope - and as somebody who worked in retail I can tell you you're wrong.

It wasn't until 2008 the big supermarkets stopped accepting cheques. In the 1990s of the non cash transactions in retail 50% were by cheque, that declined quickly through the early 2000s https://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/jan/29/consumeraffairs.personalfinancenews

Chip & Pin arrived in the UK in 2006 - it wasn't widespread for a couple of years because of the hardware which needed updating in stores.

 

[RailWonderer]

EMR refer to the following proposals:

Full time staffing, usually 24/7 or first train to last

Staffing for most trains (there's a few like Loughborough where the staff don't stay for the very last service)

Daily visits by mobile teams (presumably some sort of a care bear type)

Weekly visits by mobile teams

In the case of weekly, it doesn't seem to be specified what these teams are but it seems quite feasible to me that the likes of Sleaford and Spalding could effectively be de-staffed bar a weekly pop in.

More like the guard stepping off the train to sweep up some leaves with a broom then stepping back on to close doors and desert.

 

[Iskra]

Glossop strikes me as a bit of an outlier on the Northern retained list. Any particular reason for that one remaining?

 

[northwichcat]

I suspect there are fewer towns without a Tesco than without a railway station........

I suspect that's not correct. If you travel from Chester to Altrincham on a train, it will only stop at one intermediate station that has a Tesco. That's Northwich - the Tesco store is right next to the station. So that's 3 Tesco stores compared to 13 stations!

I accept there's Express stores as well but they're not exactly places to build up a large points balance.

 

[RailWonderer]

Good as machines are they can't yet verfiy that somebody is over 18 when they're trying to buy 2 dozen Smirnoff Ice, 20 Benson & Hedges and a kitchen knife.

Vending Machines in Japan have done this for ages now, ID scan.

 

[sor]

If you go back 70 years when you went into a shop, you didn't have 'self service' of the goods - you had a person behind the counter who picked what you wanted. Now, 70 years later you walk around the store and choose the items you want. As recently as 20 years ago you probably paid for a large supermarket shop using a cheque - try doing that now.

If, ultimately, fewer and fewer people use the staffed checkout, then yes, they will disappear. There are a few issues in that supermarkets do sell age controlled goods - which is why there will always need to be some staffing on hand. Good as machines are they can't yet verfiy that somebody is over 18 when they're trying to buy 2 dozen Smirnoff Ice, 20 Benson & Hedges and a kitchen knife.

Or they'd do as Aldi already does - multi skilling with people doing shelf stacking and other tasks and moving to and from checkouts as demand changes, which is a lot like what already goes on at the smaller stations. What you don't see is Aldi declaring that self checkouts can do everything (even though they actually can't) and thus they'll be closing all standard checkouts, as the railway apparently wishes to do.

(also you generally don't see supermarkets hauling customers in to court for missing an item from the self scan)

I suspect there are fewer towns without a Tesco than without a railway station........

Bodmin technically has neither (not a Network Rail station, anyway).

 

[RailWonderer]

This is a cost cutting exercise but the problem is when this penny pinching era ends and the government has to start a new level up the railway phase soon enough ticket offices sure won’t be returning, that’s the problem.

 

[SteveM70]

It cant be cost cutting if they are going to retain the staff

We don't know what the total number of paid hours is planned to be, but at the majority of stations it seems the number of hours with staff on hand is less than the current opening hours of the ticket office. Maybe the total hours are the same, just with more staff present at a time, but my hunch is the number of paid hours will decrease and there'll be a gradual reduction in headcount and wage costs as staff leave and are not replaced, and perhaps a round of redundancies at the end

 

[Iskra]

We don't know what the total number of paid hours is planned to be, but at the majority of stations it seems the number of hours with staff on hand is less than the current opening hours of the ticket office. Maybe the total hours are the same, just with more staff present at a time, but my hunch is the number of paid hours will decrease and there'll be a gradual reduction in headcount and wage costs as staff leave and are not replaced, and perhaps a round of redundancies at the end

Yes, I suspect the staff will be supporting those who need help during the transition phase to online or TVM’s, probably only issuing tickets themselves as a last resort. But, that is better for all involved than straight up redundancy for roles that are dwindling in importance due to technological change.

 

[northwichcat]

In the 1990s of the non cash transactions in retail 50% were by cheque

You said 20 years ago, not 30 years ago. You also implied most large shop transactions were paid for by cheque as recently as 20 years ago.

Chip & Pin arrived in the UK in 2006

Supermarkets had to accept them as the way of verifying the holder from 2006 and if they continued to accept signatures, they became liable for any fraud instead of the bank. However, the first cards were issued in 2003 and supermarkets phased in acceptance between 2003 and 2006. I attended university between 2003 and 2006, so I remember doing supermarket shopping for the first time during the 2003-2006 period. Cheques were practically non-exsistent in shops and I must have got a chip & pin card in around 2004 and none of the big supermarkets lacked the provision to shop with it.

By the way, don't feel too bad that you completly messed up on lecturing me on chip and pin roll out. You only made the same mistake Georgie Barratt made on The Gadget Show. The good news is you're not going to have thousands of people tweeting you to inform you of your mistake.

 

[yorksrob]

You perhaps do not understand economics.

In reality, it is probably cheaper to let that 10% travel around completely free of charge than to keep all this ancient booking office infrastructure in place for such a minority.

Great, I look forward to receiving my booking office users special free railpass then

 

[Silverlinky]

There is a poster up at Northampton station (one of the stations where this 'retail hub' concept will appear) which states that "ticket retailing will be relocated on this station from the ticket office to other station areas where staff are better placed to help customers buy tickets, provide expert travel advice, information and assistance to customers"
Northampton has had a strange set up for a while now where there is a customer information point which is staffed from first to last train right next to the booking office. The booking office staff sit behind glass windows and the Information point staff sit behind a desk with no windows/barriers between them and the customer.
If a customer turns up and asks for the next train to wherever, or which platform is the train to Birmingham on or similar they already go to the CIP. It now looks like tickets are going to be sold from there too, which in that particular location with that setup would make sense.

 

[Amlag]

Ticket office staff are currently in an enclosed environment /room protected by a strong glass window for their safety and security, not only for themselves but for the security of sensitive customer transaction details and of course revenue /cash etc.

Many ticket office staff, will, as basically ‘floor walkers’, more easily become vulnerable to verbal and even physical abuse from ‘undesirable‘ customers and the less fit and able will find it hard work staying on their feet for most of their shift.

By all means Management should (again) have the ability for ongoing reviews ( in consultation with local Union reps.) of ticket office staffing levels and hours, as was always done.

 

[The exile]

Vending Machines in Japan have done this for ages now, ID scan.

That of course depends on there being a nationally recognised standard ID scheme - and machines that recognise all international ID cards, otherwise it is discriminatory.

 

[Russel]

Out of interest, how many of you calling for ticket offices to remain, use them on a frequent basis?

From memory, the last time I used a ticket office was around 5 years ago, to buy a Lake District day rover at Crewe, it took the staff member a good 5 minutes to find it in the system, the impression I walked away with was that they couldn't really be bothered to deal with my request and I was an inconvenience.

 

[A0wen]

You said 20 years ago, not 30 years ago. You also implied most large shop transactions were paid for by cheque as recently as 20 years ago.



Supermarkets had to accept them as the way of verifying the holder from 2006 and if they continued to accept signatures, they became liable for any fraud instead of the bank. However, the first cards were issued in 2003 and supermarkets phased in acceptance between 2003 and 2006. I attended university between 2003 and 2006, so I remember doing supermarket shopping for the first time during the 2003-2006 period. Cheques were practically non-exsistent in shops and I must have got a chip & pin card in around 2004 and none of the big supermarkets lacked the provision to shop with it.

By the way, don't feel too bad that you completly messed up on lecturing me on chip and pin roll out. You only made the same mistake Georgie Barratt made on The Gadget Show. The good news is you're not going to have thousands of people tweeting you to inform you of your mistake.

You said 20 years ago, not 30 years ago. You also implied most large shop transactions were paid for by cheque as recently as 20 years ago.



Supermarkets had to accept them as the way of verifying the holder from 2006 and if they continued to accept signatures, they became liable for any fraud instead of the bank. However, the first cards were issued in 2003 and supermarkets phased in acceptance between 2003 and 2006. I attended university between 2003 and 2006, so I remember doing supermarket shopping for the first time during the 2003-2006 period. Cheques were practically non-exsistent in shops and I must have got a chip & pin card in around 2004 and none of the big supermarkets lacked the provision to shop with it.

By the way, don't feel too bad that you completly messed up on lecturing me on chip and pin roll out. You only made the same mistake Georgie Barratt made on The Gadget Show. The good news is you're not going to have thousands of people tweeting you to inform you of your mistake.

The cards were introduced in 2004, but the retailers were upgrading their systems later than that - I was working in retail at the time.

You may not have used cheques but in the year 2000 ~2,000 m cheques were issued in the UK, that declined to under 500m by 2016 and it's fallen since then.

In the early 00's the supermarkets were still accepting a huge number of cheques.

Back on topic 20 years ago, hardly any rail tickets would have been issued electronically - now we know over 25% are (25% was the figure in 2016) and it's grown since then. Much of that will be at the expense of ticket office sales.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Out of interest, how many of you calling for ticket offices to remain, use them on a frequent basis?

From memory, the last time I used a ticket office was around 5 years ago, to buy a Lake District day rover at Crewe, it took the staff member a good 5 minutes to find it in the system, the impression I walked away with was that they couldn't really be bothered to deal with my request and I was an inconvenience.

I've had that sort of experience far, far too often. A very significant minority of booking office staff were basically asking for this.

Not to mention the perennial "Yer'l'after go ter Lime Streets fer dat" on Merseyside, which has been being used as an excuse to avoid doing anything even vaguely difficult for 30+ years.

 

[Iskra]

Ticket office staff are currently in an enclosed environment /room protected by a strong glass window for their safety and security, not only for themselves but for the security of sensitive customer transaction details and of course revenue /cash etc.

Many ticket office staff, will, as basically ‘floor walkers’, more easily become vulnerable to verbal and even physical abuse from ‘undesirable‘ customers and the less fit and able will find it hard work staying on their feet for most of their shift.

By all means Management should (again) have the ability for ongoing reviews ( in consultation with local Union reps.) of ticket office staffing levels and hours, as was always done.

There are plenty of places which serve the general public, take cash from them and the people doing it walk around and aren’t encased in glass. Indeed, train guards have managed it for years. That objection does seem to be scraping the barrel somewhat.

I've had that sort of experience far, far too often. A very significant minority of booking office staff were basically asking for this.

Not to mention the perennial "Yer'l'after go ter Lime Streets fer dat" on Merseyside, which has been being used as an excuse to avoid doing anything even vaguely difficult for 30+ years.

Same, service at my local ticket office (that isn’t being retained) was indifferent for years and you often felt like an inconvenience. Meanwhile, I can only think of a couple of examples of great service, ever (Exeter St Davids, Wakefield Westgate).