Privilege travel before BR

[philthetube]

I read somewhere that the only company still in existence which was a signatory to the original priv agreement was the Snowdon Mountain Railway, no idea if that is true though.

 

[thedbdiboy]

No waiting any more for Silver Passes, mine came within a fortnight of filling out the forms.

True, the last waiting lists were for Gold passes but now there are so few safeguarded Active staff that there are more passes in the quotas of most organisations then staff eligible for them.

IIRC free travel was valued at £10 so you paid tax on £10, in modern terms about £2 tax.

I cannot remember if a priv season ticket was taxed additionally or not.

I don't remember ever paying tax on my free and priv travel before privatisation, maybe I will dig out my old notification of codings. The employer (BR) ran trains, so it was assumed there was no cost in allowing staff to travel on them. After privatisation I think it changed: non-TOC employers had to pay for their staff to have them (and the big lump for travel in retirement) so the employees had to pay tax on what the employer had paid.

For those who still have ‘BR’ style free travel, tax is paid on the amount it costs the employer to buy the benefit from RDG, which is about £1500. This is regardless of how often it is used by the employee.

It still is the case that for those without status passes, residential travel to work is 8 miles free, then 1/4rate beyond that. It’s 40 miles free for those based in London. Which explains why some towns were particularly popular for railway employees - Leighton Buzzard, Hitchin / Baldock, Witham, Haywards Heath, Fleet - as far out of London as you could get for free, and cheap housing (this was 20-30 years ago!)

It was a House of Lords ruling in the mid 1980s that decreed that benefits-in-kind should be charged at the marginal rate it cost the employer to provide them, which in BR's case for staff travel was nil, after which tehre was no benefit in kind tax to pay. After privatisation this ruling only applied to TOCs and ATOC so all other undertakings (e.g. Railtrack) had to start levying tax again. This results in the confusion today because not many people are aware that a different arrangement can apply depending on who you work for.

 

[davetheguard]

I was also the happy recipient of the all stations pass as a management trainee in the 1970s - but only for the region. Off duty trips in walking gear at weekends were sometimes regarded very suspiciously but never led to the challenges which seem to be a feature of today's fragmented system.
My father as a lowly Western Region booking clerk in the 1950s only got free passes for the region, I think that improved sometime in the 1960s. Still got us from Stratford on Avon to Devon but as a child I never understood why we rarely went to Exmouth but often to Dawlish and Teignmouth!
Even in the 1970s, wages grades (guards, porters etc) didn't get very much until they became 'established', can't quite remember what that entailed - was it 5 years service?

It took me ten years to get "established" status - until you'd reached it, B.R. didn't pay sick pay.

 

[Busaholic]

London Transport head office staff got free transport on all their services, then including Country buses, but not Green Line Coaches, and only paid 25% for British Rail services, including season tickets, with Priv tickets. The concession on Country buses continued with the creation of London Country on 1/1/1970 for all LT employees who were there on 31/12/69, which meant I scraped in by six weeks! Would my priv ticket usage have included my wife? (I was married young, but that's another story!)

 

[philthetube]

London Transport head office staff got free transport on all their services, then including Country buses, but not Green Line Coaches, and only paid 25% for British Rail services, including season tickets, with Priv tickets. The concession on Country buses continued with the creation of London Country on 1/1/1970 for all LT employees who were there on 31/12/69, which meant I scraped in by six weeks! Would my priv ticket usage have included my wife? (I was married young, but that's another story!)

Not just head office staff, all staff.

The situation was, in 1995, That you could have either a priv for staff member and spouse or no priv and a LT pass for spouse, but not both.