This just proves that on train ticket checks (GTR) should never have been withdrawn.
They weren't.
All Southern revenue protection staff were remapped to OBS roles (alongside around 50% of the Conductor establishment at the time), and OBSs have always had ticket checking as part of their remit. The trouble is that OBSs were then diagrammed to specific trains and mostly working solo, so the issuing of Penalty Fares and MG11 reports was strongly discouraged - for reasons including conflict management, RPOs / RPIs would traditionally have worked in multiple, and would have been able to leave trains if they needed to deal with a tricky passenger issue outside a confined space.
Around the time of the OBS switchover, the morale amongst many (though, to be fair, not all) members of staff plummeted, which meant that a number didn't bother with ticket checks for one reason or another. It's very hard to make onboard staff do ticket checks - indeed, any attempt to force this through would probably also mean that someone would get assaulted by checking a train where it's really not a good idea.
In turn, this meant that any revenue checks actually happening onboard were reduced, or minimised in areas where staff were not diagrammed to work trains, and that if a solo member of staff did find someone without a ticket, it was a case of (best-case scenario) just getting them to pay for the regular fare and leaving it at that.
It was then realised that GTR were losing money and the very small remaining Fraud teams were struggling, so gradually more teams of dedicated revenue staff have been created via secondments / permanent offers to agency staff etc. There has also been a notable increase in OBSs being sent out in pairs to deal with revenue issues when not diagrammed to specific trains. I understand the resurgence of dedicated revenue staff has paid for itself quite happily, but the exact figures are not something which I'd be privy to.
Staff on the GN and TL side were originally rebranded as Passenger Hosts around the time of the OBS scheme, and were meant to be like an "OBS lite" (more focussed on service information and assisting passengers), but this never really took off, and they mostly now do traditional revenue protection activities.
As an aside, even with agency staff turning away obviously ticketless passengers, it is a total mystery how the DfT ticket checking staff do actually manage to get a fairly low percentage figure of people evading fares. I can think of a few Southern routes where there remains near-100% fare evasion off-peak,
despite a lot of hard work by local teams. Yet the figures from the DfT don't reflect that at all, in any case.
