Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what steps is he taking to ensure that the roll-out of smart ticketing on the rail network does not exclude people without access to the necessary technology from purchasing rail travel.

Our ambition is to ensure that passengers across the rail network can use mobile phones, bar codes and smart cards across almost all of the network by the end of this year. This will mean every passenger will have the choice of travelling without a paper ticket and we do not currently have any plans to withdraw paper tickets.