Transport Insights

Fare dodging is the unavoidable story of the day but concerns are also being raised about how South Western Railway – officially state-run – is actually being run and whether its service is getting better or worse.

The BBC reports that:

An estimated £45.5m of annual revenue is being lost from passengers not paying for tickets, South Western Railway (SWR) has said.

The data was released after a campaign group submitted a Freedom of Information request to SWR, which said the overall rate of ticketless travel was about 3.9%.

On the other hand, Transport for London is proactively publicising its revenue loss from fare dodging:

It is a huge problem for TfL, costing it £190m a year. Fare evasion has increased since the opening of the Elizabeth line as more passengers use the TfL network, and many stations on the line don’t have staffed barriers.

The loss equates to 3.5% of all fare income. TfL wants to get that down to 1.5% by 2030 although it admits this will be a significant challenge.

The huge number of open stations on SWR’s network is obviously going to be a major factor.

But elsewhere in the SWR story are concerns about how the Department for Transport is actually running the company and whether it is doing enough to improved the firm’s performance.

The data was obtained by SWR Watch, whose spokesperson, Jeremy Varns, said he believed the service had got worse since May, when it became the first to be renationalised by the Labour government.

He said: “My primary concern is a lack of accountability.

“There’s still no publicly accessible contract between the operator and government and Department for Transport.”

SWR said it was in a transitional arrangement and subject to amendments.

It added that a copy of the final Service Agreement would be published in due course.

Varns also criticised SWR’s longstanding policy of treating its passengers as an afterthought when disruption occurs:

SWR also needs to ensure that operational decisions are not made at the expense of passengers who have already been inconvenienced.

Station skipping continues to occur too often.

There’s also a glaring anomaly in the BBC story.

Additionally, 7,293 trains in the last year were short formed and had fewer carriages than planned, due to train faults and other issues.

But also:

The firm added that 0.18% of services were short formed in the last 12 months 

SWR runs more than half a million trains a year. So seven thousand short formed trains is well over one in a hundred, not less than one in five hundred.

The company told me that the figure of 0.18% comes from its performance webpage, which does indeed have the figure for its rolling annual average, except that figure depends on just 946 short-formed services out of 560,946.

There were 576 in the last recorded four-week period, according to the same page, and this is in fact the number for the last four-week period in the data released under FOI.

I wonder if someone at the BBC should have done some basic maths, instead of reporting the data as he said, she said?