Opinion: How to tackle fare evasion

Now the regulator is to review protection practices and prosecutions process, our Industry Insider looks at the issues around fare evasion.

Revenue protection practices that train operating companies have in place are to be subject to an independent review conducted by the Office of Rail and Road (ORR).

In a move announced by the Transport Secretary on November 13, the review will cover how operators tackle suspected fare evasion, while retaining rigorous enforcement where a deliberate attempt has been made to avoid paying the fare.

Increasingly, revenue protection policy is to create a closed system where gates are installed to read tickets at departure and destination stations. This has been shown to reduce ticketless travel from an estimated 7% to as little as 2%.

This was the impact of providing ticket gatelines at all London Underground stations associated with the use of pre-paid Oyster cards, which deducted the applicable fare based on the recorded journey.

Once the success of this approach was evident, a national rollout was intended. But it did not go ahead - in part because of the cost of installing equipment at stations with low passenger density, and the complexity of ticket fares and validities.

A ticket gating requirement has been specified for inclusion in the delivery plans of franchise bidders, and this resulted in a significant increase in what might be regarded as a first line of defence against passengers boarding trains without a ticket (which is the main source of fare evasion).

The practical drawback has been that there has to be a staff presence, and the cost of this has seen a reduction in the time that gates are in use. This is often during the late evening, when the potential for fare evasion is high.

Ticketless travel can often be attributed to an inability to make a purchase because the ticket office is closed, or because purchase from a ticket vending machine is inappropriate for the journey being made.

A number of stations are equipped with permit to travel machines, but the presence of these appears to have declined. The purpose of the permit is to demonstrate to on-board revenue protection staff that an attempt had been made to buy a ticket, and that the issue of a penalty fare notice is therefore inappropriate.

The growth in online purchases is increasing the number of occasions where passengers are travelling with a ticket that is not valid for the service concerned. Validity is not always well communicated and leaves revenue protection staff to judge whether the irregularity is the result of a failure to know or understand the restrictions, or a more deliberate attempt to use a cheaper ticket.

Experienced staff know that patterns develop over ticket irregularities. That helps decisions about when to apply discretion and the appropriate type of enforcement action.

Some regulations might be regarded as unfair so far as the customer is concerned, such as missing a train for which an advance ticket is held as a result of a failed connection, and thus being charged an excess fare for travel on a subsequent service without any allowance for the money already paid.

Passengers can also receive a bad deal as a result of the prevalence of cancellations due to traincrew shortages, when trains run by alternative operators are used and the original ticket is deemed invalid.

Weekend Thameslink services serving Great Northern stations on Friday and Saturday evenings are particularly poor performers, but using an alternative LNER service to Peterborough to avoid a long wait brings an unjustified excess fare demand.

There are examples of deliberate fare evasion, such as buying a ticket for the first station down the line and then making a longer journey. Staff will generally be alert to regular abuse of this kind, and enforcement that leads to a prosecution is a likely action.

Young people using ‘child’ tickets when older than the age threshold are certainly making a deliberate attempt to avoid paying the correct fare. But enforcement resulting in a prosecution is less appropriate, and a penalty fare notice (effectively a written warning) should be preferred.

There is an issue with prosecutions for fare evasion by youths, in that the process results in an automatic criminal record which will bar future employment in many sectors, such as teaching. This places an obligation on operating companies to set a high bar on taking such action.

The wrong decision was certainly made in a well-publicised case of a passenger using a young persons’ railcard invalid for peak-hour travel, which resulted in an underpayment of £1.90. Whoever decided that this merited a prosecution and resultant criminal record left their common sense elsewhere.

A further issue that has arisen with prosecution for fare evasion is that there is no opportunity for mitigation to be heard, as the cases are not brought before a court but simply rubber-stamped in the back office.

The Chief Magistrate has called out this process as a denial of justice that must be reformed, which will no doubt happen as a result of the ORR review.

At least the opportunity for fraud in the ticket office has diminished. Before machine-issued tickets became prevalent, auditors looked out for tickets sold out of numerical order.

Card ticket issues were made in numerical sequence, so that a daily account balance could be taken based on the ticket numbers at the start and close of business. But if a ticket was sold out of sequence, the proceeds could be pocketed and would only show up when the ‘missing’ ticket was not there to sell.

Where no printed ticket was available, a blank ticket would have the destination written in and its value listed by hand. The fraud was to sell a ticket for (say) £10 but record a cheaper destination on the sales sheet.

People soon worked out fraud opportunities for machine-based ticket issues, which was as simple as putting a piece of carbon paper between blank ticket cards - thus printing two copies of the same ticket but accounting for only one.

The audit response was a very detailed check of collected tickets which could identify an out-of-course sequence number, a difference in the written-in destination, and for the carbon fraud two tickets with the same number often identified by different coloured printing ink.

Digital ticket purchase has rendered these practices obsolete, but new revenue protection challenges will no doubt emerge as online purchases, self-printing, and down loading to mobile devices increases.