There are a number of things that made Northern’s attempts to prosecute Sam Williamson for rail fare evasion seem a bit off. One was that he, er, had a ticket – one that was marked “anytime”. There were, it transpired, some limits on when he could use that ticket – his 16-25 railcard magically transformed that “anytime” ticket into a “not any time, actually” one. (There had been no such limits when he’d used it just a week earlier, because it had been summer.) But none of this was made clear at the point when he’d bought that ticket.
Then there’s the fact that when Williamson discovered what he described as an “innocent mistake”, he offered to pay the difference. The revenue protection officer – the change from “ticket inspector” is surely telling in itself – who checked his ticket did not allow it. But what really makes prosecution a bit OTT is quite how much revenue Northern had lost through all this: £1.90. You can’t get a coffee for that. No matter. He seemed set to go to court.
This was far from the only case of its kind, and reporter Jack Fifield has spent months documenting incidents in which Northern had seemed to overstep the bounds of decency and good sense. The woman whose £1.26 underpayment resulted in the rail operator attempting to claw back over £150. People who used railcards a few days out of date, failed to respond in good time to letters demanding fixed penalty notices and then found themselves facing bills running into hundreds of pounds. Nor is it just Northern: a court ruling back in August quashed as many as 74,000 prosecutions as unlawful at a single stroke. The details are fairly technical – something to do with the misuse of “single justice procedures”, which allows magistrates’ hearings to be held behind closed doors, and which looks more like mistake than malice – but nonetheless, the money refunded could run into the tens of millions.
The furious response to Williamson’s case when he tweeted, though – one of the last great bursts of national outrage on a website that used to be full of such things – had rather the quality of a dam breaking. After some initial sniffing about how customers had a “duty to buy a valid ticket”, Northern didn’t just back down, but dropped all such 16-25 railcard prosecutions and said they would be reviewing the cases of anyone prosecuted previously. Then the government got involved: two weeks ago, the transport secretary, Louise Haigh announced she had tasked the Office of Rail and Road with investigating how train operators tackle fare evasion, and reconsider the “labyrinth of different fares and prices”. Deliberate fare-dodging “must be tackled”, Haigh said, “but innocent people shouldn’t feel like a genuine mistake will land them in court”.
Some passengers might leap to an obvious and unflattering explanation for how we got here: that the people in charge of the British railway network are a bunch of money-grabbers who’ve deliberately made their ticketing systems so complex that even regular rail passengers struggle to use them, and have done so at least partly in the hope of catching people out. This certainly fits with the sense of a rail network, and indeed a country, providing ever worse services for ever higher prices.
There’s also perhaps an issue that if you give people a uniform and some power, some might well use it. Revenue protection officers will not always, in the course of their work, see the best of humanity. Who among us, facing abuse from strangers and empowered with the means to take our revenge, would not be tempted to get a bit court-happy?
But industry insiders, you’ll be shocked to learn, give other reasons for the increasingly enthusiastic use of prosecution. There’s the shift to digital ticketing systems, which take the validity of things like railcards on trust, and which offer no opportunity for a human being to explain the more fiddly rules to people as they buy. There’s the failure of successive governments to pass the statutory instruments necessary to raise penalty fares: this has made them less attractive as an alternative to prosecutions to a rail industry that does, in fact, need the money. There’s the culture change that followed the pandemic, when tickets went unchecked, which has encouraged a minority of passengers to become more lax in their habits. The problem is not that all or even most evaders are deliberately dishonest – it’s that ticket inspectors can’t tell who is and who isn’t.
The biggest issue, though, is who ultimately stands to benefit from clawing back as much lost fare revenue as possible. Once upon a time, it would have been rail companies and their shareholders. To keep the trains running during the pandemic, though, contracts changed, and farebox risk – ie who ultimately receives fares and thus loses out when they’re not paid – passed to the state. Overzealous ticket inspectors may feel themselves under pressure from their bosses to maximise revenue, but that pressure comes, in turn, from the government. In other words, the call is coming from inside the house.
This raises a whole other problem when it comes to airy promises to simplify the fare system. Rail travellers don’t want to see to see discounts removed, but the alternative – cutting back the cost of more expensive tickets – would mean less revenue for the railways, and it’s hard to imagine the Treasury signing off on that. This mess will not be easy to fix.
Nonetheless, there is no way of looking at many of these prosecutions and concluding that the system as it stands is working. Buying the right ticket should be easy; people should not be facing court for underpayments worth pocket change. And no matter how much you know about how fares are used to manage demand, it’s hard to look at train tickets costing more than transatlantic flights and avoid the conclusion that something, somewhere, has gone wrong. Haigh is right: this can’t go on.
Jonn Elledge is an author and former assistant editor of the New Statesman
