Railways Bill (Second sitting)

Daniel Francis Excerpts

Tuesday 20th January 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Keir Mather]

I will certainly take that away.

[Daniel Francis (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Lab)]

Q I should declare that I am the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for wheelchair users—one of my children is a wheelchair user. Having used SNCF’s retailer to book assistance, I will say it is not the best game in town. Under the new arrangements, do you see that there could be advantages for bringing accessibility information together, particularly given the way it currently works across train operating companies? How would that be sold to disabled passengers?

Catriona Meehan: You raise a really good point: having only one retailer offering certain things, such as accessibility information, is a problem. That is why we need several retailers, to have that competition and to work on those products and make better offerings. That is something we do in the third-party retail market.

John Davies: There is always more that can be done in this space, of course. Trainline has been in discussion with the Rail Delivery Group regarding access to its central system, which would enable us to offer passenger assistance to customers and to book the kind of assistance they need at stations or on board trains. That was what I was referring to earlier as one of the features that we have been unable to secure access to. Of course, giving the broadest possible access, in the right way, to customers with additional needs is an extremely important part of what we all do.

[Daniel Francis]

Q I hear the merits of having different retailers, but where you have one operator—as we see in London with the TfL Go app—do you see benefits in having all the accessibility information in one place, because that operator is able to collate it and pull it together?

John Davies: I think it is a bit like there being one central seat reservation system that every train operator uses. Every customer who books a ticket, via whichever operator, accesses the same seat reservation system—there is one definitive record. The same could be true of passenger assistance bookings.

Rail Delivery Group, or its successor, which will be part of the retail industry and management function in the future, could have a system—a definitive record—of all availability of assisted services on offer in the industry. That could be accessed by any retailer, so that customers can book assistance as they need it, for stations or on board trains, and the staff at those stations and on those trains know who to expect and the kind of assistance that is needed. It would all be aggregated in one place, but drawn upon by as many retailers as needed.

[Laurence Turner]

Q In Trainline’s written evidence—possibly to the Transport Committee rather than this one, or possibly to both—there is a reference to a view that there might be some particularly sensitive data within GBR that Trainline believes should be firewalled off from any ticketing function. I think the suggestion is that there may be some operational information to which GBR’s ticketing function should not be given privileged access. I was wondering whether you could expand on that point and explain what types of information we are talking about. John Davies: What we are advocating for is that whatever flows of data or information are necessary for, say, a GBR online retail function to do the work of helping customers engage with the rail industry—to book tickets, to travel and to do all those things—all those sources of information should be made available equally, at the same level and without discrimination, to whoever has a legitimate cause to use them.

One of the things that becomes problematic is this. Thinking about something like the centralised seat reservation system, which is a piece of industry architecture, we are currently able to draw on it at a very granular level. We take a very base level of data and are able to use it in different ways, as are other retailers, to design good customer experiences. For example, a 28-day view of the availability of cheap fares for any given journey is not that straightforward if you are only able to access information that has previously been filtered—let us say by a future GBR—which has decided that all you are going to have available are five single and return journeys for the date on which you have made the inquiry.