Flexible Ticketing: Rail Transport

Debate between James Cartlidge and Ranil Jayawardena

Thursday 10th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ranil Jayawardena (North East Hampshire) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that his constituent makes a good case for using new technology and the new options in e-ticketing? If it is possible to board a plane using one’s iPhone, would it not be possible to board a train?

[James Cartlidge]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. I will talk about technology later in my remarks.

Another email that hits on some other points is from Russell Badrick, a solicitor who works in London but lives in Nayland, a beautiful village on the Suffolk-Essex border by the river Stour. He says:

“I was born in the constituency, and have recently moved down the road from you, to Nayland. I am a commuter and work in London. I work from home one day a week, and I commute the other four days.

You no doubt must receive a great many messages complaining about the Abellio Greater Anglia Services, which are generally very poor. The notion that they might be nationalised is obviously crazy”—

he is clearly sound. He continues:

“I wanted to ask you if anything was being done to persuade Abellio to introduce flexible tickets? It is becoming increasingly common for people to work from home, yet we are still forced to pay the season tickets for the entire week, month or year. For me, that means paying for 365 days of travel, when in fact I only travel on 208 of these. In fact, when holidays are discounted, I only travel 192 days a year.

On the basis of me paying £5,520 a year (i.e. 15.12 a day), this means I am really overpaying for 173 days a year – i.e. a full £2615.76 – again, obviously crazy.

I appreciate this is a business decision on the part of Abellio, but in this situation I, like many of your constituents, are captive consumers. Can anything be done about this?”

I should add as a caveat that while he talks about £2,615.76, Members—especially my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Craig Mackinlay), who I believe is an accountant—will know that that is taxed income, so the real figure is far more than that.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Cartlidge]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. I will come on to how we would pay for it and the positon of the rail companies.

I want to reflect on the progress that has been made, because there is a lot of ongoing work and it was in our manifesto. To be fair to the Government, in October 2013 the Department for Transport published its fares and ticketing review, which proposed several schemes to make ticketing more flexible, including long-distance pricing, advance tickets on the day of sale and flexible part-time season tickets. The report stated that the plans could mean

“receiving a discount on season tickets for travelling three days rather than five, or for travelling earlier or later, avoiding the busiest trains, or there could even be an incentive for not travelling on certain days of the week”,

all of which I welcome.

[Mr Jayawardena]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way again. He is making a very strong case for flexible ticketing in terms of not only the number of days, but the way in which we manage demand on the railways. Often there is capacity available, but it is underutilised, so flexible ticketing could incentivise us to make better use of our railways. That is particularly true of students; indeed, those in my constituency have said that they would welcome that.

[James Cartlidge]

That is another very good point.

The south-east flexible ticketing programme is the main system that is being developed. There are many ways to describe it, but I call it the Network SouthEast Oyster: it is the equivalent of Oyster for the south-east overground. The beauty of South Suffolk, however, is that technically we are not in the south-east, but fortunately we are part of the south-east flexible ticketing system. I hope the Minister will tell us more about that programme and the progress it is making.

I wrote to the three companies bidding for the Anglian franchise to ask them what their plans were for flexible ticketing. Chris Atkinson of National Express highlighted that it currently holds the c2c franchise and that flexible season tickets will be offered on that line as early as this summer, so progress is being made.

Jamie Burles of Abellio Greater Anglia explained that the company will be extending two innovative flexible ticketing schemes to customers during the current franchise, which I welcome. The first will be SEFT, which I have described, and he also told me of a live trial with a third-party smart ticketing supplier that is providing a post-travel account-based payment solution—the multi-pass scheme—which is currently being trialled on the Cambridge to London line. The company plans to extend it to other parts of the network in the first quarter of this year.