The report by the Government’s Office of Rail and Road (ORR) department says the system needs to “work better for passengers” who are being targeted unfairly when they make honest mistakes.
Stephanie Tobyn, director of strategy, policy and reform at the ORR, said the system is “leaving some passengers who make innocent errors vulnerable to disproportionate outcomes.”
“Effective revenue protection is essential for a sustainable railway, but it must be fair and proportionate for passengers,” she added.
Inconsistency and confusion
The report said rail ticketing had become more complicated and that penalties for passengers who had innocently selected the wrong tickets were severe.
It gave examples of customers who had selected the wrong railcard inadvertently when buying a ticket, so although the discount received was correct, the railcard name was wrong, and where a passenger’s ticket was water damaged and could not be scanned, the passenger was threatened with prosecution.
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The ORR found that though fare evasion was increasing, current revenue protection practices are largely weighted towards the industry.
It stated: “This may result in unfair or disproportionate outcomes, with passengers being penalised for innocent or minor mistakes.
“Action needs to be taken to improve fairness, consistency and transparency while ensuring that TOCs are able to deal with deliberate and persistent fare evaders robustly.”
The report also noted a huge rise in prosecutions of fare evaders, with charges brought against passengers up 52% between 2019 and 2023 despite a 7% decrease in passenger numbers.
The use of a new streamlined prosecution process, the Single Justice Procedure, made it easier for train companies to prosecute for fare evasion, but a judge later ruled this was unlawful and train companies including Northern Rail and Greater Anglia had thousands of prosecutions quashed.
Peter Hendy, the rail minister, said: “Deliberate fare-dodging costs the taxpayer up to £400m annually – money [that] could be better spent on improving passenger experience – and must be dealt with, but ham-fisted prosecutions that punish people who have made an innocent mistake is not the way to do this.”
Recommendations to Government
The report recommends that a number of changes are made to make the system clearer and fairer. These include:
- Clearer ticket restriction information at the point of purchase and ultimately a review of the ticketing system to eliminate confusion
- Better logging of fare evaders’ names and addresses rather than immediate escalation when a mistake is made, so that persistent evaders can be identified but genuine mistakes are not penalised
- A common framework for appeals, including not prosecuting passengers for a first or second offence
- The creation of a body to oversee train companies and their revenue protection policies
- A wider review of revenue protection legislation
The Secretary of State will now consider the recommendations and how (and the extent to which) these should be implemented.
The Rail Delivery Group, which represents train companies, said fare evasion was a “significant challenge, costing the railway hundreds of millions of pounds each year.”
“We need to strike the right balance addressing genuine, honest mistakes made by customers and taking firm action against those who deliberately and persistently seek to exploit the system,” a spokesperson said.
“The rail industry is taking concrete steps to simplify fares, ticketing and retail,” they added.
