Peter Gibson
Main Page: Peter Gibson (Conservative - Darlington)Department Debates - View all Peter Gibson's debates with the Department for Transport
Railway Ticket Offices
Peter Gibson Excerpts(8 months, 1 week ago)
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Peter Gibson (Darlington) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder) on securing and so ably leading this important debate.
Darlington station’s ticket office sold 133,785 tickets in 2022. That is 368 a day. I recently spoke to one of the ticket clerks there, and they have been sending a member of staff out on the platform to work in the proposed way. This is not scientific, but the clerk estimated that 50% of the people they tried to help still needed to come into the ticket office to be properly assisted.
As the Minister is aware, Darlington Bank Top station is in the process of a £139 million transformation, including the construction of new platforms that will significantly increase the station’s capacity and the number of people it serves. It seems madness to close the ticket office at Darlington at this time and undermine the important Government-funded redevelopment.
The Minister has already heard my concerns on this issue. I have raised a number of issues with him, including the siting of ticket machines, the unavailability of tickets via apps and machines in the minutes before boarding a train, and the anxiety caused to passengers threatened with penalty fares.
There is tremendous cynicism in our society these days as to what a consultation means. It is now almost a universally held belief that, when a consultation is commissioned, the decision has already been made and the process is conducted solely to pay lip service to the public’s views. I am grateful to the Minister for listening to me on this issue and for his reassurance that this is a genuine consultation, that the voices of my constituents will be heard loud and clear, and that Darlington Bank Top station can keep its ticket office.