Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of automatically awarding season ticket rail passengers with compensation in respect of a delay to their travel.

Since announcing ‘one-click’ compensation in October 2018, the Government has introduced a requirement for new franchises to introduce simple automated Delay Repay claims systems, available via smartphones and smartcard registration, to make it easier for passengers to claim compensation when they have suffered delays.

Automated ‘one-click’ compensation schemes make it very quick and easy to claim compensation and have a number of advantages over automatic compensation schemes – for example, the fact that passengers know they have received compensation and also that the risk of fraud is reduced, because passengers need to ‘click’ to confirm they were on the delayed train.