A requirement to wear face masks on the Tyne and Wear Metro will be scrapped “in the very near future”.
After the last remaining Covid-19 restrictions in England were lifted last week, a North East transport boss says that face coverings will soon cease to be a prerequisite for travelling on the Metro – though most passengers are not wearing one now anyway.
Face coverings have remained among the Metro’s conditions of carriage throughout the pandemic, but the rule has not been enforced by operator Nexus’ limited staff.
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As recently as last November, when the government made masks a legal requirement on public transport again due to the emergence of the Omicron variant, up to 95% of Metro passengers were complying with the mandate.
But that figure has dropped dramatically in recent weeks, with latest Nexus estimates saying that only 38% now wear a mask on Metro trains.
Martin Kearney, Nexus’ chief operating officer, said: “I think it’s fair to say I don’t mind being cautious [about keeping the requirement to wear masks].
“Yes we have kept it as a condition of carriage, but we are only just seeing cases reduce within Nexus.
“They went up when Omicron first came in and that has been relatively consistent until about two weeks ago, and it has only been slowly dropping.
“I don’t apologise for being cautious. I cannot ask my team to enforce people wearing masks because I will not put them into a position of conflict.
“However, I will say that it is our intention to remove it from the conditions of carriage in the very near future. But we are doing it cautiously and step by step, I am thinking about my team.”
Mr Kearney said that the highest mask uptake is during the morning commute period and that there “aren’t many people wearing them” in the evening.
He added that he expects the removal of the condition “won’t be much of a big deal at this stage”.
When the legal requirement to wear masks was first lifted by the government last summer, Metro bosses said that their continuing rule on doing so would be used only as a "base for positive encouragement" rather than a reason to refuse people access to trains.
Metro’s conditions of carriage, a contractual agreement between the network and its customers, also include things like not smoking or acting in an abusive or threatening manner.
