ForTheLoveOf
Established Member
- Joined
- 7 Oct 2017
- Messages
- 6,416
I fundamentally disagree with the notion that we should be criminalising people who fail to pay their fare at the first opportunity (the so-called "pay when challenged" people), or even those who actively attempt to avoid payment of their fare ("fare dodgers").
It isn't theft in any sense of the word, because no physical property is appropriated. It is a service which is not paid for, and one which it costs the TOC no more to provide whether there's an extra passenger or not. It's not like failing to pay a taxi fare, for example, where the journey was specially only made for your benefit.
If the operators fail to take the required measures to ensure that all customers pay the fare they want them to pay, I don't see that they should then be able to come whinging to the Courts when people go ahead and take advantage of their failures. I fundamentally don't see how it's anything more than a civil dispute over payment between two parties.
If fare evasion is morally justified in being an offence then why is wilfully refusing to pay any other debt not an offence? It's a debt like any other, if the TOCs let it arise, and should be enforced in just the same way.
In any case I cannot possibly condone TOCs taking people to Court for as long as they don't clean up their act. There are so many instances of TOCs and their staff engaging in immoral, tortious or illegal conduct. It goes unpunished the vast majority of the time and the playing field simply isn't level when consumers have no easily accessible redress against things the TOC does seriously wrong, and yet the TOCs have the machinery to invoke the ire of the Courts at a moment's notice as soon as someone does the slightest thing out of line.
I think it boils down to the fact that the relationship between TOC and passenger fundamentally isn't one of equals. It's one of the TOC being, by far, the mightier party. To then give them the ability to prosecute people, with no oversight whatsoever to prevent the misuse that inevitably occurs, is simply ludicrous. And in any case it is the state getting involved in something that is a private arrangement or disagreement between two private parties.
It isn't theft in any sense of the word, because no physical property is appropriated. It is a service which is not paid for, and one which it costs the TOC no more to provide whether there's an extra passenger or not. It's not like failing to pay a taxi fare, for example, where the journey was specially only made for your benefit.
If the operators fail to take the required measures to ensure that all customers pay the fare they want them to pay, I don't see that they should then be able to come whinging to the Courts when people go ahead and take advantage of their failures. I fundamentally don't see how it's anything more than a civil dispute over payment between two parties.
If fare evasion is morally justified in being an offence then why is wilfully refusing to pay any other debt not an offence? It's a debt like any other, if the TOCs let it arise, and should be enforced in just the same way.
In any case I cannot possibly condone TOCs taking people to Court for as long as they don't clean up their act. There are so many instances of TOCs and their staff engaging in immoral, tortious or illegal conduct. It goes unpunished the vast majority of the time and the playing field simply isn't level when consumers have no easily accessible redress against things the TOC does seriously wrong, and yet the TOCs have the machinery to invoke the ire of the Courts at a moment's notice as soon as someone does the slightest thing out of line.
I think it boils down to the fact that the relationship between TOC and passenger fundamentally isn't one of equals. It's one of the TOC being, by far, the mightier party. To then give them the ability to prosecute people, with no oversight whatsoever to prevent the misuse that inevitably occurs, is simply ludicrous. And in any case it is the state getting involved in something that is a private arrangement or disagreement between two private parties.