Railway Ticket Office Closures must be halted…
Railway Ticket Office Closures must be halted…
A few months ago, I was asked by a local resident about a rumour about Network Rail moving to close all the ticket offices at the stations. I was concerned, so I asked Network Rail / GWR if this was the case and was assured that they had no plans to do so.
This week, we find that there is a consultation on – yes you guessed it – closing the station ticket offices. It’s on the Transport Focus website, and you have until 26th July to comment.
www.transportfocus.org.uk/train-station-ticket-office-consultation/
I do like the option of having a machine to dispense tickets at all hours of the day or night, but so often it doesn’t work. The machine is broken, I don’t have the right credit card, or something goes wrong. I rely on the person in the office to fix it and help me get my ticket.
Now imagine if I had impaired sight or had a hand tremor and found the touch screen difficult or was using a mobility scooter. The screen option becomes a nightmare. It doesn’t take much to become reliant of the help you get from a person in the ticket office.
The consultation suggests that the relevant staff will still be around – on the platform to help. I’m not sure how you get to them if you don’t have a ticket on stations with barriers.
Once again, we see the reduction of a public service in the search of higher profits for the Train Operating Companies. They don’t go short of a profit at the end of the day, and often that is supported from public subsidy.
Talking of which, this week we saw more reports of sewage on the beaches. Water company investment has been lacking for years. Even the father of free market economics, Adam Smith, said that markets had no place in a monopoly service.
In many services that we rely on, we have already cut to the bone trying to remove the fat. The original argument for privatisation was that we would see more investment from the private sector and we would have better services. Instead, we have private ownership supported by public subsidy. This is the practice of ‘privatising the profits and socialising the losses.’ Society is paying and private companies are collecting.
What I think we are seeing is the end of Thatcherism. The established conservative view of Margaret Thatcher’s monetary economics, privatisation and de-regulation has led us to this situation.
It doesn’t have to be like this. It is time for a change.
I always like the model of Channel 4 – even though it was started under the Thatcher government. Channel 4 is run as an efficient private company, it generates its own running costs, and takes no subsidy - but it is owned by the public purse. Public ownership means that the company isn’t looking over its shoulder at shareholder value all the time.
Nationalization of the 1970’s was a nightmare. Westminster isn’t good at running companies directly, and why should it be. But there are other was of achieving public ownership.
We need to move beyond a simplistic Nationalisation versus Privatization argument and look at both organisation and ownership. Public services should be publicly owned, no matter how they are organised to run.
