The rail regulator failed to secure a timescale by which the country’s biggest rail franchise would implement a key part of its accessibility plan, meaning that the firm could remain in breach of its obligations to disabled passengers for years to come.
Govia Thameslink Railway’s (GTR) Accessible Travel Plan (ATP) includes a trial of ‘mobile assistance teams’ to help disabled passengers at 41 stations on its network.
The company admitted in a leaked internal document that these stations, which are unstaffed and mainly serviced by driver-only trains, were inaccessible to some passengers without the new service and that it was in breach of its legal obligations. However, it subsequently denied that the leaked document accurately represents its position.
All train firms are required by their operating licences to establish and comply with an ATP, which must be approved by regulator the Office of Rail and Road (ORR).
The ORR approved GTR’s plan in December 2020, making specific reference to the trial of 41 stations, which it said it would monitor. However, it did not stipulate a date by which the trial should reach the agreed coverage.
GTR told Transport Network that it began rolling out the trial in December last year, after a threshold for the post-pandemic recovery of passenger numbers – agreed with the ORR – was met.
Mitcham Junction is served by a mobile assistance team
However, it has so far only rolled out the service – under which staff with ramps travel from a hub station to other stations within a 20-minute road journey – to 17 stations. The company said the pace of the rollout had been hit by recruitment difficulties.
GTR told Transport Network that while it is ‘absolutely committed’ to the full programme of 41 stations, there is no specific date for achieving this. At the current pace of rollout, the trial would achieve the coverage promised towards the end of next year – around two years after it began and three years after the policy was agreed.
Given that the trial would have to run at full scale for some time before being evaluated, it is likely to be many years before the service – if successful – would be rolled out across GTR’s network.
The Association of British Commuters (ABC), which revealed the leaked GTR document, has estimated that the company runs 150 stations where staff are either not available or only available for part of the day, the majority of which are served by driver-only trains.
Co-founder Emily Yates told Transport Network: ‘GTR’s admission of lawbreaking has already caused huge shockwaves across the disability rights and trade union movements. Everyone wants to know - how has GTR been able to get away with these unlawful staffing policies for 12 years? And why is the ORR still letting GTR and other train companies run rings around it?
‘Too many people and organisations have stayed silent, despite a dramatic rollback of accessibility by GTR, beginning with the removal of the guard from Southern Rail in 2017. Having proven that GTR is knowingly in breach of equality law, our investigation will now move on to the ORR’s complicity in the scandal.’
The ORR’s guidance on ATPs states: ‘Operators must ensure that passengers who require assistance are able to make as much of their journey by rail as possible.’
The regulator said when consulting on the guidance that it wanted to move away from the use of taxis to take passengers needing assistance to alternative stations, and GTR has acknowledged that this was a driver for the trial of mobile assistance teams.
However, the inclusion of an open-ended, small scale trial in the firm’s ATP has allowed it to pay lip service to this expectation, while doing very little in practical terms.
Despite repeated enquiries from Transport Network, the ORR declined to state whether it was happy with the pace of GTR’s rollout of the trial.
It also stated that when agreeing GTR’s ATP it had accepted that the ‘pace’ of the rollout would be affected by the impacts of the pandemic on passenger numbers. However, its letter to GTR approving the policy shows that it only agreed that the commencement of the trial would depend on this.
The ORR also told Transport Network that it will ‘continue’ to hold GTR to account against the commitment to 41 stations ‘in our regular engagement with them’, but declined to give details of discussions.
When Transport Network asked the ORR how it is able to ‘hold GTR to account’ without a promised timescale, it claimed that GTR’s revised ATP, updated this April, ‘commits GTR to rolling out the trail of mobile assistance teams to a further 41 stations over the coming months in 2022'. It added that it ‘therefore’ expects the rollout to be complete ‘within 2022’.
However, the document actually states: ‘We plan to phase the introduction of this trial over coming months in 2022’. GTR has made clear that it regards this as providing a target for the start of the rollout, rather than its completion.
It told Transport Network: ‘We have begun the introduction this year as outlined in our ATP.’
The ORR told Transport Network that it will monitor GTR’s approach to assessing the trial’s effectiveness. However, the regulator’s own letter approving the firm’s ATP states that it will itself monitor the results of the trial through quarterly meetings. It adds: ‘We expect to review its effectiveness by the latest on the date of GTR’s annual ATP review.’
The ORR told Transport Network that it has ‘not yet’ made such an assessment. It added that that it has accepted alternative arrangements for providing assistance at unstaffed or part-staffed stations that may be serviced by trains where there will be no second member of staff on board from four other train operators.
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