Oral Answers to Questions

Peter Kyle Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Claire Perry]

First, I commend my hon. Friend for consistently promoting the interests of his travelling constituents. He may be aware that from next February, c2c, which runs trains throughout his neighbouring county in south Essex, is introducing an automatic compensation system, which will provide compensation after two minutes of delay for those customers who are registered and signed up to its system. That is exactly the sort of scheme I want to see nationally, so we will closely monitor the roll-out of this programme to see whether it can be rolled out across other franchises.

[Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)]

Flexible ticketing was announced in 2013 and was wildly popular in the south-east when it was trialled in 2014, but there are rumours that it is being kicked into the long grass. Will the Minister scotch those rumours for long-suffering commuters in the south-east by announcing the date for its roll-out?

[Claire Perry]

The hon. Gentleman is right to point out that the south-east flexible ticketing scheme, to which the Government have committed £80 million, is being implemented. We are currently looking at the best way to roll that out across the train operating companies. It has already gone live on Southern, Govia Thameslink Railway and indeed on c2c, and we are talking to Southeastern about the right date to introduce it. I would be happy to meet him to work on this together.