My Lords, I declare my interests as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and of the Accessible Transport Policy Commission. The first amendment in this group, Amendment 17, continues the debate that was started at Second Reading on the concerns over the provision of assistance services and trains for disabled passengers.
Also in this group are Amendments 27A, 38 and 39. On Amendment 38, which I support, I just want to point out that the disabled passenger card is very important to disabled people. Scope tells us that the average disabled household faces £975 a month in extra costs and that, after housing costs, the proportion of working-age disabled people living in poverty is 27%. That is higher than the proportion of working-age non-disabled people, which is under 20%.
Travel is a luxury for many, but if they want to buy a ticket in person, and there is no ticket office available at their station, they cannot use their disabled passenger pass with a ticket machine. This amendment talks about other key ticketing issues that we need to address. Amendment 27A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is an amendment on ticketing but does not highlight these specific details that I find inconsistent and confusing. My view is that it may be helpful to have this detail in the Bill for the annual report, because the annual report is also a helpful route to transparency and accountability.
Amendment 39 would require the Secretary of State to establish an independent body to monitor the impact of the Act on passenger standards, and I welcome that too. I hope the Minister does as well.
Amendment 17 in my name—I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Randerson and Lady Grey-Thompson, and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for adding their names to it—puts in the Bill a requirement for the Secretary of State to abide by the law in issuing a statement of accessibility standards and confirmation that a public sector company meets the required levels of accessibility. This is about not just the accommodation for individual journeys but the entire service, including booking platforms and any other digital service or system used.
It also includes toilets, which I know appear later on, but let me just say on this subject that I spend my life sitting opposite open toilets because wheelchair spaces are always by the toilets. When they are not very clean, it makes journeys every single day extremely unpleasant, but another effect is that if you are sitting in a wheelchair you become the toilet monitor when either there are people inside it or it is not working. The passengers look at you crossly as if it is your fault that they cannot get in. I see that the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, understands what I am talking about.
Why is this amendment necessary? At Second Reading the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, when she introduced the Bill, spoke about services only in the context of
cancellations and disruptions, and there was nothing about the actual experience of the passenger. In the context of Amendment 17, the passengers requiring assistance are not always disabled, by the way. As I said in the debate on the previous group, we have to recognise the demographic change in this country, and a lot of passengers will require assistance in the future because they are getting elderly.
I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, who, following my speech, in her winding speech said that
“there has been some improvement over the last few years—for example, the new two-hour booking window for assistance and the Passenger Assistance app
”.—[Official Report, 7/10/24; col. 1894.]
Neither of those two things is an actual improvement for disabled passengers. Yes, very large amounts of money were spent on developing two apps, and the first is for passengers. When that was being consulted on, all the disability groups and individuals asked for the capacity to be able to buy their tickets at the same time, but it does not permit that.
Why is that important? For some journeys you have to book a seat—a literal seat—when you buy your ticket, for example from Trainline or from a train operating company that you start your journey with. I quite often do journeys from Watford to Euston, Euston to York or Euston to Edinburgh. If I do not go on to the LNER app, I have to get a ticket reserved via the West Midlands app. It is a seat that I cannot use. Anyone who travels on LNER regularly will know that, at peak hours, there are no seats available, yet there is one with a sign above it saying “reserved” that I cannot use. If I have time, I will find the train manager before I board the train and say, “By the way, I have G16 reserved. I am not going to be sitting there”. This is a software problem but, perhaps more importantly, it is a problem of Network Rail and others not listening to the needs of disabled people.
You then have to ring or email the train operating company for that leg of the journey and book your assistance separately. LNER tells me that I should use all the different apps for each leg of my journey, but the whole point of the app was that the passenger should have to enter only one thing. The total irony of this is that behind each of the train operating company apps is one single app. It is an absolute nonsense, and it is all because disabled people were ignored. The noble Baroness, Lady Campbell of Surbiton, were she in here place today, would remind us that she and many other disability people have championed “Nothing about us without us” for many years, but the rail industry has not yet understood it.
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There is a second app that the public never see, and that is the assistance app used by the assistance staff. It is fairly new and it is true to say, from my conversations with staff at a number of different stations, that it works reasonably well at the big stations and terminuses. However, for individual staff members at smaller stations, who may be performing 10 different roles, the app is not helpful, especially if the journey that the passenger is taking is a short one. They may have competing assistances at different stations at the same time.
At Second Reading I spoke about going on Southern Railway and having to get off the train at Hither Green and find somebody to come with me to Lewisham East to get me off there. When returning to Lewisham East, I had to ring Hither Green to get somebody to come from Hither Green, and this is the problem. The app for staff does not take into account the current staffing levels, where there are no staff at the station and there is nobody on the train who can get the passenger on or off. That was why I made the comments earlier, in response to the amendment in the previous group from the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, because at the moment there is total chaos. Passengers do not understand what is happening at each station.
The standards of service for disabled passengers are also affected by the accommodation. There are a couple of good new rolling-stock trains—the LNER new train is good and there is one on the line I use —but most of the train stock that is under 30 years old is likely to be around for the next 30 years. That is not good or comfortable. One of my bugbears is that you cannot travel as a family in a wheelchair space. There just is not enough room. Heaven help you if you are a couple who both use wheelchairs. You do not sit together; it is just not possible.
The noble Baroness, Lady Blake, also referred to the two-hour window prior to travel for booking, but that is also utterly meaningless if there are no staff on the train or at the station. Turn up and go, which is a legal right, is becoming more and more irrelevant. This is not because of the staff or what the staff are doing. Once again, it is the lack of staff and the increase in elderly people needing assistance because of demographics. I have absolutely no doubt that the Minister wants assistance services to actually provide the assistance that passengers—especially those who are disabled—need. It must be a vital part of this Government’s strategy to get disabled people back to work. At the moment too many disabled people cannot rely on the assistance they need on a train, before we even look at reliability and overcrowding, which is why jobs can become too difficult to get.
Finally, the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, offered a meeting with me and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson. I am sure we look forward to that invitation coming shortly, whether it is from her or from the noble Lord, Lord Hendy. Please can we have that meeting prior to commencing Report? I beg to move.