Crowthorne is a small Berkshire village that happens to have a very useful railway station. Northbound trains on Great Western Railway (GWR) run to Reading – the key junction for points west and north – via Wokingham, which offers a change of train to London Waterloo. In the opposite direction, GWR runs to Gatwick airport via Guildford.
Just the place, then, where you might imagine the ticket office to be busy with passengers booking complicated journeys. Crowthorne’s ticket office would ideally be staffed all day long, but at present the hours run only from 6.45am to 10.30am from Monday to Friday – timed to coincide with the morning rush.
Let’s look at that rush. According to the 2022-23 figures from GWR, 26,000 passengers bought or collected tickets at Crowthorne during the course of a year. So how many tickets do the staff working in the ticket office actually sell each day on average?
One.
Yes: in the 261 weekdays during those 12 months, just 263 tickets were sold. Never has the term “single ticket” been more appropriate.
It may well be that the sole purchaser of a ticket needs the help of a well-trained and experienced GWR employee. But staffing that ticket office must cost at least £100 per day. Selling a £5.80 single to Reading is an extremely expensive business.
This is happening in an industry that is currently losing £4,000 per minute on top of the usual taxpayer subsidy of £12,300 per minute. Given the eyewatering sums being pumped into a dysfunctional industry, paying someone solely to sell an average of one ticket a day is an issue that must be challenged.
Under orders from ministers, GWR proposed that the staff member should move out from behind the glass window to help travellers more widely. The rail unions maintain that this initial move would inevitably end in redundancy.
Industrial relations on the railway are appalling, with the RMT and Aslef locked in long and bitter disputes over pay and working arrangements with the employers. But is the best use of (let’s guess) £25,000 annually for someone to be ready behind a screen at Crowthorne station waiting for the daily customer to turn up?
On Tuesday morning, 31 October, that question became academic. The transport secretary, Mark Harper, announced the job will remain the same.
Reversing government policy on the railways is easy. Just ask the government.
Earlier this month Rishi Sunak annulled 14 years of political consensus on the need for High Speed 2 to transform the rail network in northern England. He cancelled plans for the HS2 line from Birmingham to Manchester.
All of which must have come as a surprise to the Rail Delivery Group (RDG), the organisation in the unenviable position of representing England’s leading train operators at the same time as fulfilling the wishes of ministers – who now call the shots through management contracts with those rail firms.
In June, the government asked train operators to come up with radical proposals to close ticket offices and redeploy staff.
The train operators duly did what they were told. The proposal for the bonfire of the ticket offices sparked nationwide protests from passengers – especially those with disabilities.
Ministers have now decided to keep everything exactly as it was. Anyone would think there’s an election heading our way.
“Government has asked train operators to withdraw their proposals,” the transport secretary.
The response from Jacqueline Starr, chief executive of the Rail Delivery Group, was too polite to point out that the proposals were made because ministers had asked for them. Instead, she pointed out that rail firms had worked with passenger bodies to try to improve the original plans: maintaining staffing levels, improving ticket vending machines and designating a single “welcome point” at stations in dialogue with accessibility groups and passenger bodies.
Ms Starr said: “These proposals were about adapting the railway to the changing needs of customers in the smartphone era, balanced against the significant financial challenge faced by the industry as it recovers from the pandemic.
“At a time when the use of ticket offices is irreversibly declining, we also want to give our people more enriching and rewarding careers geared towards giving passengers more visible face-to-face support.”
Instead, the status quo prevails. But the Crowthorne Anomaly, as I shall embellish it, looks unsustainable.
The next transport secretary, whoever she or he may be, could ignore the problem and continue to ask the taxpayer to staff that Berkshire ticket office. But unless there are grown-up conversations about how to run a financially viable railway that delivers a decent service to passengers of all demographics, the system will face an inevitable spiral of decline.
