Rail Fares

Debate between Baroness Chapman of Darlington and Alison McGovern

Wednesday 5th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern]

I am sure that the hon. Lady is extremely competent at double-checking peak times and the validity of her tickets when she travels, even if she is in a part of the country that she does not know. However, businesses have told me that they find the situation difficult.

The national rail inquiries website is good, but I am not always sure that it is that clear. The better solution would be to print the peak times on the ticket. Surely, in this day and age, we can set up a digital printer that can print the peak times on restricted tickets. People would then not need to make sure that the 3G was working on their phones so that they could look the information up. If it was on the ticket, that would really help people.

[Jenny Chapman]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. I emphasise that not only digitally incompetent people make the mistake. I am on the east coast main line every week, and there is virtually never a journey when somebody in my carriage does not have to pay an excess surcharge because they have made a mistake to do with the peak, off-peak and super off-peak times.

[Alison McGovern]

“Super off-peak”—there’s an expression. What does it mean? I am a regular train user—a train geek, some have said—but I am not clear when a super off-peak ticket would allow me to travel to Darlington or anywhere else.

We need a more common-sense solution. Although Members of Parliament might have smartphones in their pockets and be able to look things up as they go, a huge number of travellers—particularly older ones, who might be seeking the cheapest possible ticket for understandable reasons—would not be so confident, or would be less likely to go online and look the information up easily.

We need the information to be really clear, not least because there are some strange anomalies in the peak and off-peak scenario, especially in respect of my constituency, which is close to the Welsh border. Services going into Wales have a different peak and off-peak arrangement.

Some years ago, there was a great hurrah when we got a reduction in the number of types of tickets. Now there are supposed to be just four types of train tickets, including advance, off-peak and flexible, so that people can be clear. Personally, I do not think that that works. We need another look. We should either reduce the number of types of tickets or increase the ways in which people can be made aware of the validity conditions of their tickets. The complexity is increased because there are so many vendors of tickets—so many different organisations sell train tickets that the ways in which train ticket validity can be communicated are extremely diverse.