Anna Firth
Main Page: Anna Firth (Conservative - Southend West)Department Debates - View all Anna Firth's debates with the Department for Transport
Railway Ticket Offices
Anna Firth Excerpts(8 months, 1 week ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Huw Merriman)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder) for securing this important debate on railway ticket offices. I also give a warm welcome to his new role to the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan). I look forward to working with him.
I will give my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset two minutes to wind up, but in the time I have allotted to me I want to set out a little more detail about the consultation, as many of the questions I have been asked have had that in mind. I will also discuss the rationale for the moves. I will try and take the odd intervention if I can, but, if I cannot, I will ensure that I respond to all right hon. and hon. Members who made their points.
I thank Members for their kind remarks and I enjoy working with everybody across the divide. I want to continue to work with all those who have railways at their heart, and at the heart of their constituencies, to make the railways work. I am a passionate advocate of this, but Members are the champions and I want to continue to work with all Members. I recognise that some of my points will be accepted while others will not, but we will continue to liaise and engage, hopefully with the good spirit and kindness that I have been shown this morning.
Huw Merriman
I will make some progress and then I may have some time to take interventions.
Together with the rail industry, we want to improve and modernise the experience for passengers by moving staff out from behind the ticket office screens to provide more help and advice in customer-focused roles. As hon. Members have recognised, there has been a huge shift in the way in which passengers purchase their tickets at railway stations, with about one in every 10 transactions taking place in ticket offices in 2022 to 2023, although I take the points that that differs across the estate. Despite that change in passenger transacting behaviour, stations have hardly changed in the past 10 years, which means that staff are constrained to work in ticket offices, although they could serve passengers better on station platforms and concourses. Ten years ago, the ticket office proportion of sales was one in three and it is now almost one in 10.