Why the campaign to keep ticket offices open must succeed

13 train companies opened a consultation in July 2023 on the future of 1,000 ticket offices. The proposals were to replace ticket offices staffed by humans with ticket machines. The train operators called it “getting staff from behind the glass”: passengers and unions alike saw it as a cost-cutting exercise that would result in the loss of up to 2300 jobs.

I don’t know what the train companies expected, but the response from passengers, passenger groups, staff and unions was immediate - and vocal: over 680,000 responses came through in two months in opposition to the proposals.

Organisations representing people with disabilities and older people were particularly vocal in how the lack of that human contact would prohibit them from travelling or would leave them open to unsafe and insecure stations. What happens when ticket machines malfunction, as machines do, and there are no ticket office staff to attend to passengers who need to travel?

And, of course, ticket machines don’t know how to work out the cheapest fares, so more money will end up in the pockets of shareholders. This is not about “modernisation”, as both the Government and the train companies say: it’s about maximising profits for shareholders, not putting passengers first.

The result of the consultation should send a very clear signal to both Government and train companies that this proposal must be scrapped. There was a Westminster Hall debate today (13 September) on the need to retain ticket offices, attended by MPs across all parties, which shows just how unpopular this idea is, and why it needs to be defeated.