Buy a ticket before you travel. Problem solved.
This hardly solves the problem. What about those instances where one is issued an £80 penalty despite holding a valid ticket which was purchased before travel? And yes it does happen!
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Of course, then at the first possible opportunity.
Let's be honest the only way you will ever get the £80 plus whatever letter is if you don't have a genuine reason for not buying a ticket.
This is incorrect. £80 fines (and penalty fares) are issued to those who have a genuine reason for not buying a ticket before travel, and indeed in some cases to those who have already purchased and hold a valid ticket for travel. Any claim to the contrary is not grounded in reality. Indeed it is for this reason that an appeals process exists!
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I'm quite sure that there is such an appetite. There are a few on this forum, members and staff, who have been vociferous in their outrage and objection to Northern's 'Failure to Pay' scheme (FtP) and whom would be eager to see that scheme challenged and quashed.
I suggest that those who are "vociferous in their outrage and objection to Northern's 'Failure to Pay' scheme (FtP) and whom would be eager to see that scheme challenged and quashed" have more of a problem with its implementation rather than the principle of it.
I can only speak of my experience. However, after two £80 fines which should not have been issued given I was in possession of a valid ticket on each occasion, a four month battle to get Northern to stop threatening me with prosecution for boarding a train at a station which has no ticket issuing facilities, yet which their prosecutions team insisted did despite clear empirical evidence to the contrary, and, of course, having to put up with the sometimes outright rudeness of some of their untrained third party contractors who are given customer facing revenue protection roles, some vociferousness in outrage and objection is to be expected.
I suspect that Northern's own Prosecution's department would have some eagerness for a challenge, looking forward to a vindication of the scheme.
I'm more sanguine, and expect that such a challenge may not, ultimately, provide a judgement of such wide reaching impact that the FtP scheme is either judged to be utterly repugnant in law, or else utterly lawful. I can see four grounds of objection to a decision from a lower Court, with success in arguing any one of these grounds leading to the specific circumstances being judged as the creation of an unlawful charge. It would fail to answer the other questions, and fail to provide the breadth of application which gave a conclusive ruling on the scheme.
Perhaps Northern would welcome vindication of their scheme. Equally if a ruling went against them, perhaps it would focus their attention to implement the scheme in a more professional manner. Perhaps it would have no effect all. I know nothing about the impact of legal challenges! Only one way to find out!
I've previously expressed a more balanced assessment of the scheme, even complimenting Northern Rail on their innovative and pragmatic approach to fare evasion.
This doesn't strike me as a 'balanced assessment'. In fact lauding Northern's approach without reference to the wider issues of implementation is anything but balanced. Perhaps a more 'balanced assessment' would be to acknowledge the merits of Northern's innovative scheme to tackle fare evasion (which I do and support fully), but to equally acknowledge there remain several serious issues in how it is implemented on the ground, which in my experience Northern have yet to make any substantive attempt to tackle. To claim the scheme is perfect in every way is, quite simply, an unsustainable argument.
