It should go. Delay repay is a cost whether it be borne by all rail travellers or by taxpayers. Attempts have been made to quantify the costs, including the 'vast army of bureaucrats', esp e.g,. regarding 'attribution' ,though I forget the 'results'. It's part of the blame culture- it's 'someone's fault', 'someone must pay', and our understanadable irritations at delay.
The thing is it mostly
is someone's fault. You'd expect a discount if something else was not delivered as described, e.g. a builder took three times as long to complete your kitchen as he said he would because he'd taken on too much work, which is almost directly analogous to Avanti's failure to staff adequately to operate the timetabled service.
It's not like the whole "you tripped over and sued the shop because you weren't looking where you were going" - it's a partial refund for not delivering the service that was proposed to you when you decided to purchase it. The timetable is core to the railway's offering - however much they may claim otherwise, the product is "being taken from A to B leaving at xx:xx and arriving at yy:yy". That's the basis on which most decisions to purchase are made.
I probably would consider dropping Delay Repay 15, it's a small refund for a very minor delay, but I'd offset it by packing in claiming that if you have a train at 10:00 and one at 10:30, if the 10:30 arrives one minute early then that's not a 30 minute delay, because it de-facto is, as the 10:00 probably arrived one minute early too due to wilfully inserted recovery time. If a cancellation takes place and you take the train timetabled 30 minutes later, then that should be considered a 30 minute delay, not a 29 minute one. I did get paid out on appeal with text that quite pointedly accused them of taking the mick, using evidence from Realtime Trains of every single train that day that ran (other than the cancelled one) having arrived one minute early, but it must happen a lot without being appealed or with the appeal being refused.
I think I'd also consider, and I know many on here won't like it, tying it to the ticket, so if you use splits you can claim only on individual ticketed legs, as that makes things much simpler and thus cheaper to operate with far less human intervention needed. You get a discount by splitting, so there's no reason you shouldn't be entitled to a bit less DR in return for that, and sometimes it'll be to your benefit anyway, e.g. being able to claim for part of a journey even if it didn't delay the overall split journey due to the connection being long or a break of journey being intended. Obviously I wouldn't change passenger rights to e.g. taxis/hotels for combinations of splits. Or as an alternative it would be allowed on splits but only if they were booked on a single booking reference, and in that case any attempt to make partial claims on a per-ticket basis would be refused.
