ORR to strengthen guidance on compensation when passenger assist fails

[ainsworth74]

Spotted this article on Disability New Service:

Activist’s legal threat set to lead to more generous compensation for rail passenger assistance failures​

Rail companies are likely to be forced to provide more generous compensation when they fail to assist disabled passengers, thanks to the actions of an accessible transport campaigner.

The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) has written to train and station operators to tell them it plans to strengthen guidance on how they should compensate disabled passengers for failed assistance.

It has taken the action after disabled activist Doug Paulley (pictured) threatened legal action because rail operators were basing compensation for failed assistance on the price of the rail ticket.

This has meant that disabled passengers who have experienced significant and upsetting discrimination and major disruption to their travel plans have received just the price of their ticket by way of compensation.

Paulley pointed out to ORR that the compensation available through the courts, when taking a case for discrimination under the Equality Act, was often many times higher than that offered by the operators.

He has already exposed how compensation cases taken to the Rail Ombudsman have been leading to “ridiculously low” awards when compared with county court actions.

Now ORR has written to train and station operators to warn them that it plans to reconsider its guidance on how they should draw up their own Accessible Travel Policies (ATPs)*.

It plans to draft new guidance that will tell operators to consider future compensation claims “on a case-by-case basis, informed by an assessment of the circumstances and the impact on the passenger, and in consideration of all relevant legislation”.

The regulator said it was acting after Paulley’s legal threat, and court and ombudsman decisions that showed that in some situations “significant” financial compensation can be appropriate.

[...]

Activist’s legal threat set to lead to more generous compensation for rail passenger assistance failures

Rail companies are likely to be forced to provide more generous compensation when they fail to assist disabled passengers, thanks to the actions of an accessible transport campaigner. The Office of…

www.disabilitynewsservice.com

Interesting development and I have to say welcome. It's very disappointing that the industry still gets assistance very very wrong quite so frequently and then when it does is so parsimonious in trying to make good the potential harm inflicted (basing compensation on delay repay style compensation is a nonsense). Obviously in any system operated by humans there will be failings but some of them seem so basic and fundamental (such as wheelchair users being left on trains, which I've seen for myself, I once had to help lift a wheelchair user off train when the booked assistance failed to appear and they were in serious danger of being overcarried) clearly there are serious issues.

So if the industry can't get better at assistance for moral reasons, perhaps financial ones will focus minds on ensuring assistance is provided when required!

 

[kingqueen]

Thank you.

The ORR has announced a consultation.

Rail regulator proposes to change redress policies when booked assistance fails disabled passengers | Office of Rail and Road

The Office of Rail and Road says redress claims for failed rail passenger booked assistance should always be assessed on a case-by-case basis, rather than based on ticket price, in a letter sent to the rail industry which seeks views on the proposal.

www.orr.gov.uk

Rail regulator proposes to change redress policies when booked assistance fails disabled passengers​

The Office of Rail and Road says redress claims for failed rail passenger booked assistance should always be assessed on a case-by-case basis, rather than based on ticket price, in a letter sent to the rail industry which seeks views on the proposal.

 

[Tetchytyke]

So if the industry can't get better at assistance for moral reasons, perhaps financial ones will focus minds on ensuring assistance is provided when required!

I think that’s what it will take. The current system means it’s more cost effective to have insufficient staff than it is to treat disabled people correctly.

A friends of mine was left on a train at New Pudsey last week. She’d only travelled one stop from Bradford and they still forgot!

 

[43066]

So if the industry can't get better at assistance for moral reasons, perhaps financial ones will focus minds on ensuring assistance is provided when required!

Agree with the thrust of it - assistance fails do happen too often.

That they will have to consider carefully consider how to implement it in a way that provides an incentive to improve, though. In a nationalised system with operators not taking revenue risk just increasing the amount of compensation won’t be much of an incentive on its own.

 

[TUC]

As someone whose wife is disabled and uses assistance when travelling I have mixed feelings about this. If, for example, an assistance failure causes you to miss a flight or be late for a theatre show, then of course compensation should reflect this. However, my wife also cringes when she sees disability activists wanting compensation for discrimination and hurt feelings etc., for an assistance failure. Her view is that she wants to be treated as an equal, not as a fragile flower.

I am also unsure about the legitimacy of seeking to extend compensation to Turn Uo and Go situations, unless that is advertised as available. Of course disabled people want to be able to travel at short notice in the same way as anyone else, but it's hard to see why in most situations a call when leaving the house could not be made. 30 minutes warning of assistance being needed is more help than none at all, and the reason a person who just turns up has no one available to assist might be because the staff member is busy assisting someone who has booked in advance.

 

[357]

I helped thousands of disabled people while working on stations and admit myself that I forgot a few times. Staff are stretched too thin .

Most of the time it was due to dealing with emergency situations elsewhere on the station and the passenger completely understood.

However, later after becoming a driver I recall being shouted at by a member of control room staff for refusing to move my train from Pitsea until ramp assistance had been provided to two MIPs who had already been forgotten on the way into London and had to go to Barking and come back again.

 

[TUC]

I helped thousands of disabled people while working on stations and admit myself that I forgot a few times. Staff are stretched too thin .

Most of the time it was due to dealing with emergency situations elsewhere on the station and the passenger completely understood..

I do recognise those kinds of challenges. What would perhaps help is an app/message that keeps reminding the staff member until the assistance is completed, plus the ability to message the passenger to advise there has been a delay.

 

[357]

I do recognise those kinds of challenges. What would perhaps help is an app/message that keeps reminding the staff member until the assistance is completed, plus the ability to message the passenger to advise there has been a delay.

I used to set an alarm on my phone for 6 minutes before the train was scheduled to arrive, and in the office select the train on our map software so the screen would "follow" the train.

An app that tracks the train with an alarm would work well, however the apps that I have seen just give one notification that is easily missed amongst the constant bombardment of email notifications about disruption at the other end of the country.

 

[Gflynorw]

As a guard, I'm also fed up of people putting luggage in the wheelchair spaces and self entitled parents who feel their huge oversized prams take priority - it's a wheelchair space ... some of us staff take our responsibility toward disabled customers seriously.

 

[kingqueen]

I absolutely love staff like you who have a positive and committed attitude to assisting disabled people.

At the risk of diverting the thread, I do think that there should be facilities to make it as easy as possible for all passengers to travel, including those with prams and pushchairs. But that these should be separate facilities and not abusing wheelchair spaces.

Doug

 

[VItraveller]

there are a whole lot of reasons why assistance fails, but in my experience, it’s always best for staff at the departure station to telephone ahead to the arrival station, this doesn’t always happen because some staff feel that simply updating the journey on the app is enough but that often leads to problems.
There really should be some facility for disabled passengers to communicate through the Passenger Assistance app, I have the number for Birmingham New Street Accessibility telephone line which has smoothed things along on many occasions but not all stations provide that information.
as for the point about not being treated differently, I would argue that for every one disabled passenger who seeks compensation for issues with the passenger assistance service, there will be 10 or 20 who don’t yet those who do improve the service for everyone else and I think it takes a lot of failed assists before people feel the need to challenge the company in court.

 

[styles]

So it should.

My mum tried to use passenger assistance back in 2013 and it just didn't turn up. She instead had to drive the length of Wales and was late for a volunteering meeting she was meant to be attending.

That was her first time trying passenger assist and it completely removed her confidence in the system. To the point that the next time she tried it was a whole 11 years late in 2024, and that was with me there as her companion.

She has done it again since, once, with my sister as her companion.

I doubt very much that she would have confidence in the system using passenger assist alone still, even though she now knows how to use the mobile app etc herself and is familiar with some of the stations' passenger assist facilities.

She's coming up from Wales to see me in Scotland in the summer and I'm fully expecting that I'll have to travel down to bring her up, then travel back down with her again afterwards. The risk of passenger assist not turning up, being stranded, missing infrequently-timed direct rail services, etc is just too high. And when it all goes wrong, all you get it compensation basically equivalent to the cost of your ticket, unless you really push.

there are a whole lot of reasons why assistance fails, but in my experience, it’s always best for staff at the departure station to telephone ahead to the arrival station, this doesn’t always happen because some staff feel that simply updating the journey on the app is enough but that often leads to problems.

While I approve of this idea, it only works for stations which are staffed. My mum's nearest 9 stations are unstaffed. Also not all of the platforms have working passenger information points to talk to the station operator.

There really should be some facility for disabled passengers to communicate through the Passenger Assistance app, I have the number for Birmingham New Street Accessibility telephone line which has smoothed things along on many occasions but not all stations provide that information.

Some stations actively refuse to give out such phone numbers as well. See https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...concerns-questions.271784/page-5#post-7285691 as an example.

as for the point about not being treated differently, I would argue that for every one disabled passenger who seeks compensation for issues with the passenger assistance service, there will be 10 or 20 who don’t yet those who do improve the service for everyone else and I think it takes a lot of failed assists before people feel the need to challenge the company in court.

Absolutely. A lot of people resign themselves to a poor service. My mum is one of those people. She gave up with her complaint to (then) Arriva Trains Wales about her passenger assist not turning up, when really she should've been perusing 45p/mile for the drive she had to do, plus her rail fare back, plus compensation for the distress. She was in real pain when she arrived because her legs struggle with longer drives due to arthritis and osteoporosis. Had I known better at the time, I might've suggested she contact local media to highlight her story, though not sure if she'd have gone for that.

The impact of passenger assist not turning up has the potential to be far worse than many other passengers' delays. That this hasn't been recognised until now is pretty sad really.