And, if I may ask, how do you feel about this?
I agree with what you are stating here. A court will indeed side with the TOC due to the nature of how many cases of fare evasion there will be in comparison to this. I am interested to know if you think this is acceptable though.
First, just to say that I completely agree with the comment made by londiscape in #32. That the offence is one of strict liability does not mean that the burden of proof is reversed. However, the facts that have to be proved are limited to whether the passenger boarded the train without a valid ticket or other authority to travel. What was in the mind of the honest passenger - their reasonable belief of having been given verbal permission - is irrelevant. It is this which puts the honest passenger in the position of having to find hard evidence with which to counter the claim that they had no authority to travel without a ticket.
I think the current approach lacks rigour. A passenger may honestly believe that advice given to them as a result of an enquiry to railway staff amounts to permission to travel without a valid ticket, but this is very likely to lead to them being asked to pay an excess fare, buy a new ticket, pay a penalty fare, or, in extremis, be prosecuted. This is surely not an acceptable way to treat honest passengers.
Is I see it, there are a few ways in which the situation could be improved and all have been mentioned by others on this thread.
1) Benefit of the doubt. This is the suggestion that where a dispute arises over verbal permission which leads to a consideration of prosecution, the benefit of any doubt should go to the passenger. This would stop honest passengers being prosecuted, but it would leave an open goal for fare dodgers to exploit. You could say that's the TOC's problem, but one way or another, it's honest passengers who will pay for the travel of the dishonest ones, so encouraging it would be a two edged affair. It's also not clear whether the same benefit of doubt which would apply to a consideration of prosecution would also apply to the demand for payment of an excess/penalty fare.
2) Change the bylaw. If the TOCs didn't have the backstop of the strict liability offence and had to make claims for payment of fares through the civil courts they would have to be more careful about what passengers are told, as what the passenger reasonably understood from what they had been told would become a relevant matter if it got to court.
3) Document the process. Bletchleyite's suggestion is that passengers are issued with a permit from a (serial numbered?) pad. The important thing is that this can be traced back to the issuer, but it need not be overly bureaucratic to administer. Staff would simply write in the date, train(s) and station to which authority to travel had been given.
As I have said, my preference would be for option 3). My only reservation with Bletchleyite's suggestion was that in the meantime the TOCs should/would, of their own volition, adopt option 1).
