Ten years ago TfL proposed closing all their ticket offices on the Underground. There was an outcry. Two years later they snuffed out the last one and hardly anybody noticed.
Now it's the turn of the rail companies across England, who yesterday signalled a mass extinction of all but the largest ticket offices. Lurking behind the scenes are the Rail Delivery Group and behind them the Department for Transport, determined to 'modernise' the network in one giant cost-cutting tweak. They claim that last year only 12% of rail tickets were sold at ticket offices as more and more passengers prefer to purchase in-app or online. They also claim that 99% of all transactions made at ticket offices can be made at a ticket machine, so they intend to bring staff out onto platforms and concourses to assist passengers in buying tickets at machines instead.
It worked for TfL because they had a card-based solution available to all, meaning you could rock up up at any station, wave your Oyster/contactless card and be charged the correct amount for your journey across the capital. It's nowhere near as straightforward on the rail network with its multiple operators, super-off-peaks, railcards and "not valid via"s, indeed ticket machine complexity is notorious for encouraging people to walk away having paid far more than they actually needed to. Rail companies are now starting to roll out tap-and-go pads at more stations across the southeast, which'll solve some of those issues, but it's appallingly cavalier to be closing hundreds of ticket offices before the launch of a viable national e-ticketing strategy.
Rail passengers already cope without ticket offices at 43% of stations across the UK, while a further 40% are only staffed part-time. But whittling down the number of properly-enabled stations to a bare minimum is going to antagonise many, make life difficult for more and dissuade others from even rocking up in the first place. Ian Visits has written a post which explores many of the wider issues which I don't intend to go into here, but I will say I think it's wildly unwise to be going ahead quite so far quite so fast. Only a few weeks ago a nice lady in a ticket office saved me £30 by suggesting splitting three tickets to Eastbourne, plus I had a guarantee the combination was valid, plus she processed them far quicker than if I'd been trying to do the same at a machine. If this change won't affect you then great, but spare a thought for those it will.
My intention today is to summarise which stations are losing their ticket offices (or perhaps more efficiently to identify those which'll be keeping them). But I soon discovered that this is a remarkably difficult task. No central list has been published because everything's been divested to the separate rail companies who manage the stations and they've all taken different approaches to presenting the information. They do all have links to the three-week consultation on their homepages, so that's something, but after that the waters get rather more muddied. It's almost as if the DfT ordered them DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES PUBLISH A LIST OF TICKET OFFICES THAT ARE CLOSING and they've all found different ways of hiding the truth. It may look like a unified consultation but in reality it's a masterclass in coordinated obfuscation.
So let's see what's been proposed by the ten rail companies who stray into the London Travelwatch area. London Travelwatch are the body responsible for running all these consultations, not the rail companies themselves, and their website does at least provide a useful launchpad even though it contains no significant detail on what they're actually consulting on. Note that the Overground and Crossrail and are not affected. Deep breath...
Well this is instantly brutal. Avanti currently run 20 ticket offices from London to Scotland and their intention is to close every single one. This includes provincial hubs like Crewe and Coventry but also massively busy stations like Birmingham New Street, Manchester Piccadilly and (I can't believe I'm typing this) London Euston.
Long distance rail travel is dominated by advance ticketing so Avanti's turn-up-and-go traffic may be light, but closing Euston's ticket office would also affect shorter hops with other operators like London Northwestern. We're on course for the ridiculous situation whereby London Euston will become ticketofficeless but piddly South Hampstead, one stop up the Overground, will still have a counter where you can buy any ticket to anywhere.
c2c have a bespoke consultation page which invites you to submit a response to proposals which aren't explicitly explained. A link to "Find out more about the consultation here" merely takes you to a generic national site and the actual proposals are instead buried inside eight pdfs, some of which turn out to be massive data dumps. Only one lists the proposals at each station, and even then you have to search through 25 pages for the phrase "It is proposed that all ticket office windows at this station will close", which it turns out most of them will. Of the 25 c2c stations only six are staying open, these being Benfleet, Basildon, Grays, London Fenchurch St and Southend Central. Londoners should note this means the ticket offices at Limehouse, Barking and Upminster are toast.
Chiltern is another train company going the whole hog. Their consultation page is remarkably brief and never says the crucial word "closed", merely that "staff will be brought closer to customers by moving out from the ticket office into the public areas of stations." They go on to say "Our proposal is for you to purchase your travel online or via mobile apps before arriving at the station" to which my response is "I bet it is, you miserable belt-tightening Scrooges". The only way I managed to get confirmation of what they're actually proposing was on Twitter where a customer service agent said "Hi. This proposal is for all ticket offices. If this proposal goes ahead then the change will happen at 100% of stations." So yes, even London Marylebone with its massive contingent of Bicester-bound tourists will go, every last one.
This is the most devious operator of the lot because they don't say how many ticket offices will be closing. All they say on their website is "To see what is proposed at your station please view the station-by-station consultation document", but the 19-page spreadsheet is a masterclass in misleading redefinition. For each of 170-odd stations it first lists "Current Ticket office hours" but follows this with "Proposed Ticketing assistance hours" which is something different and could just mean someone helpful standing on the platform. According to the spreadsheet every station will still have "Ticketing assistance hours", which looks positive, but absolutely no hint is given as whether to a ticket office might be involved so it's impossible to properly complain, the bastards.
It's already the case that 60% of GWR stations are either unstaffed or don't have a ticket office, mainly because they operate lots of tiny halts out in the sticks as well as several more important stations. But if you want to find out which stations are losing a ticket office they won't tell you up front, you have to go digging through an 81-page pdf. It is a very good pdf packed with data (Weston-Super Mare's ticket office sold 91,124 tickets last year, 22% of transactions at Windsor and Eton Central were in cash) but you really have to look hard for the key phrase "Ticket Office windows close". If I've counted properly they're closing 70 ticket offices and keeping 14 open, namely Bath Spa, Bristol Temple Meads, Exeter St David's, London Paddington, Maidenhead, Newton Abbot, Oxford, Penzance, Plymouth, Reading, Swindon, Taunton, Truro and Worcestershire Parkway (but only until the end of 2024 and then they die too).
My thanks to Greater Anglia for making this easy by being specific, which is very much a rarity in this consultation. As well as providing an A-Z list of stations which currently have a ticket office they've also helpfully summarised their intended outcome... ruthless but clear.
The remaining 47 stations, they say, would have staff out and about for all or some of the day. Also note that the seven survivors are now to be called Customer Information Centres, indeed it does sound like an edict has gone out from central government that ticket offices must all now be called something different... which'll mean nobody can ever kick up a fuss about "ticket office closures" ever again.
London Northwestern have also provided an A-Z list but this time you have to open up every single station to discover what's going on. I've done this and I reckon 30 ticket offices are going, from King's Langley to Lichfield Trent Valley, and only six are staying. They're Milton Keynes Central, Northampton, Nuneaton, Sandwell and Dudley, Watford Junction and Wolverhampton, and they too are being rebranded as "retail and customer service hubs". But it's not all joined-up thinking - London Northwestern say that Walsall is closing whereas their sister company West Midlands Railway say it's staying open, so who knows?
You won't discover SWR's plans on their consultation page, only that they propose to "transition our station colleagues" by "bringing them out of the ticket offices and into the stations". The actual proposals are buried in a 99 page Powerpoint presentation and ah yes there it is, halfway down slide 20, "It is proposed that ticket office windows at all our station will close." All of them, ouch.
Like Great Northern they've misleadingly compared "Current ticket office opening hours" to "Proposed station staffing hours" because they're weasels. And the actual list is buried in a map on slide 11 where every station on their network is categorised from 1 to 4. Only the 24 Category 1 stations will retain "Interim full retail capability" (Ascot, Axminster, Basingstoke, Bournemouth, Clapham Junction, Fareham, Farnborough. Haslemere, Havant, London Waterloo, Portsmouth & Southsea, Poole, Richmond, Ryde Esplanade, Salisbury, Southampton Central, Staines, Wareham, Weymouth, Wimbledon, Winchester, Woking and Yeovil Junction) and the other 130 are rapidly doomed.
Southeastern are doing things differently, introducing their closures in stages with just 40 stations in the first phase. Their first phase consists only of stations within Greater London, all of which already have an Oyster/contactless option up and running, so you could say they're being kind or you could argue they're taking out the low hanging fruit first. But their intended final phase is to end up with "Travel Centres" at just their 14 busiest stations, which would be Ashford International, Bromley South, Canterbury West, Dartford, Dover Priory, Hastings, London Bridge, London Charing Cross, London St Pancras International, London Victoria, Margate, Rochester, Sevenoaks and Tonbridge. This may not be the outcome passengers want, but Southeastern have perhaps explained what they're doing better than anyone else.
Southern also fall under the GTR umbrella, so like Great Northern and Thameslink they direct you to the same deliberately useless station-by-station consultation document. But this time there's also a list of GTR stations that'll continue to sell "tickets that cannot be bought online or on ticket machines", which might be the same as having a ticket office, although it's made clear this is only an interim measure. The lucky 18 are Bedford, Brighton, Chichester, Eastbourne, East Croydon, Finsbury Park, Haywards Heath, Horsham, Huntingdon, King’s Lynn, London Blackfriars, London Victoria, Luton Airport Parkway, St Albans City, Stevenage, Sutton, Welwyn Garden City and Worthing. But it's not many, and if you narrow it down to stations actually served by Southern it's not very many at all.
In conclusion it's worth remembering that this is only a consultation so it's perfectly possible that, say, Euston will be reprieved as a distraction while hundreds of other ticket offices are swiftly extinguished. But the direction of travel is clear - the government would rather not have any ticket offices remaining open and those that survive this round may not survive the next. I reckon it's a scandal they're killing off quite so many before an all-inclusive ticketing solution is in place because absolutely none of this is to help the customer, only to ease the burden on the taxpayer. And don't expect to find it easy to complain because they've made it as difficult as possible to find out exactly what's going on which should make any feedback unhelpfully unfocused.
And yes, once ticket offices vanish obviously eventually we'll all cope... or else we won't bother to travel at all.
