London Underground: Industrial Action

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

Will my noble friend take account of the fact that at many London terminus stations connecting with the Underground, there are huge queues of people and a lot of machines that work only slowly? For London Transport to say at this time, “We are going to close all the ticket offices”, sends out the wrong signal. London Transport needs to overhaul what is going on, at which point it will have a much better case to take to the trade unions.

[Baroness Kramer]

I am afraid that essentially I cannot agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, on this one. Only 3% of journeys actually include going to a ticket office. The number of visits has fallen extremely sharply as people turn to buying online, using machines, taking advantage of systems like the Oyster card and, increasingly, using their bank cards. As he will know, the goal of London Underground is to change the role of those working with these ticketing issues by bringing them out from behind the glass of the ticket office and on to the platforms. They will be given a much wider range of responsibilities to help people, building on the kind of experience we had with the Games makers in the Olympics. They should be able to teach and train people to use the machines and provide support in a much more effective and flexible way. I would think that that has to be the future and a reasonable path to tread.