My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Snape, for giving us an opportunity to debate this issue.
In principle, I fully accept the need to update penalty fares in line with inflation. However, if you look at the £20 fine that was fixed in legislation in 2005, the rates of inflation have been very low in the intervening years since 2005. It is highly unlikely that overall
prices have multiplied by a factor of five in the past 18 years. Such a swingeing increase in the level of the fine or penalty fare is tone-deaf in a period of such massive disruption; for example, through strikes on the railway and, leaving the strikes aside, a very poor service from several train operating companies—including TransPennine and Avanti, to name but two. I fear that customers are totally fed up with the service they are getting in some parts of the country. Faced with fines of this size, they are likely to lose their temper with staff; I am not happy with the risks that that might pose.
This is apparently to be called not a “fine” but a “penalty fare”. That invites the question of whether the penalty fare should relate to the size of the fare that you should have paid; surely it should. You might have been going to pay a fare of as low as £5 to go from one stop to the next, or you might have been due to pay a fare of much nearer to £50 or £100. So the £100 fine—let us call it a fine because that is what it is—becomes totally disproportionate if you were due to pay only £5, whereas it is very reasonable if you were due to pay £50.
My belief—it echoes the comments made by the noble Lords, Lord Snape and Lord Berkeley—is that the promised reform and simplification of fares must come first. I am frustrated by the delays to government plans. The reform of fares has been promised to us year after year. At the moment, it is only too easy to get the wrong fare by mistake. For example, I believe that there are three different definitions of “peak time” for trains going through Birmingham; Birmingham is featuring largely in our debate this evening.
I draw the Minister’s attention to the principles of punishment. When he was about to set up the police force, Sir Robert Peel coined the concept that it is not the severity of the punishment that deters criminals but the certainty of it. He said that at a time when we were deporting people to the other side of the world for minor theft. The police force was supposed to increase the certainty of being caught; indeed, it did so by a considerable amount. The problem on the railways now is the lack of certainty of being caught and the lack of inspectors on trains. Also, in many stations, gates are left open because there are no staff to supervise them; this happens often late in the evening or early in the morning. There is also a lack of staff to ensure that ticket machines are working. I urge the Minister to ensure that the Government incentivise train operating companies to employ additional staff and enforce ticketing rather than imposing what is clearly a haphazard fine regime.
Finally, I want to refer to the complexity of devolution. The Explanatory Memorandum refers to it; however, I have read and reread it, but I do not understand it, so I want to ask the Minister about it. It states:
“If a passenger is travelling on a train in England but is travelling to Wales … then the penalty fare of £100 … can be issued and an authority to travel for the section of the journey within England only. Penalty fares issued within … Wales are a matter for those devolved administrations to determine.”
It goes on to say that:
“Where a penalty fare is issued within England and the passenger wishes to travel to the next station which the train calls at and this is within Scotland or Wales, they should be issued with the penalty fare of £100 reduced to £50 if paid within 21 days but not an authority to travel as part of the penalty fare.”
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Can the Minister please explain exactly what that means in practice for the member of staff who has to issue the penalty fare? Also, what is the difference in practice between a penalty fare for travelling between Swindon and Bristol Parkway and one issued between Bristol Parkway and Newport? More importantly for me, as someone travelling from Wales—I am interested because this is what people will ask me about—what about people travelling from Newport to Bristol Parkway? Will the penalty fares be issued only when people get through the Severn tunnel on the English side? I can see the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, being interested in this as well. He knows as well as I do that the rail line between Cardiff and, say, Birmingham, goes up the border and threads in and out of Wales—will staff be standing there waiting to decide which country to issue the penalty fare in? To make a serious point about this, what discussions have been had with the Welsh Government about liaising in a way that ensures that life is sensible and bearable for the staff working on trains going between Wales and England?