EVERYONE who cares about public transport should take part in the Rail Delivery Group consultation on the future of ticket offices, which closes on July 26.
The assault on ticket offices has been long planned, and is part of a wider strategy of managed decline of the railway system.
Consultations will not be enough to stop the threatened closure of every ticket office in England. But the fight must take place on all fronts, and rail bosses must be exposed as having no mandate for their actions.
The Rail Delivery Group says it needs to cut costs. Revenue is down since the pandemic and passenger numbers are at their lowest since 2002, it argues.
But any government that took its own commitments on reducing emissions and slowing global warming seriously would be trying to significantly increase use of public transport — especially by rail, the greenest form of mass transit.
If passenger numbers are low, a responsible government would be asking why, and how they can be raised.
Changing commuter patterns might be part of the reason, but it is surely not irrelevant that Britain has the highest fares in Europe — for one of the most unreliable services.
Calls for investment in an extensive high-speed network like that which has been rolled out so successfully in China are sometimes dismissed on the grounds Britain is a relatively small country.
Yet thousands of domestic flights take place every month, and it is usually far cheaper to make a long journey — from London to Scotland for example — by plane than by train. These prices actively incentivise the most polluting form of travel.
Not only does the government not invest in upgrading the network, it will not even maintain the one we have.
Part of the package that provoked sustained industrial action by the RMT union over the past year was the demand that the union swallow losses of 2,500 maintenance roles, leading to 670,000 fewer hours of maintenance work annually.
A poorly maintained railway will become unsafe, while points failures and a reduced capacity to cope with weather fluctuations or other disruptions to normal service all follow.
Privatisation has degraded the service too. Where once a level of redundancy was built in, with operators rostering enough staff to cover sickness absences or replacement services, a cast of money-grubbers intent on squeezing every penny out of the system do not hire enough workers even to keep to their timetables without overtime.
Few passengers nowadays rely on rail services to run smoothly even when workers are not taking industrial action — which again might explain low numbers.
The government has done everything possible to provoke the industrial action that has taken place, and to prevent a resolution.
Ministers forced operators to add clauses such as for driver-only trains to proposed agreements with RMT last year in a deliberate bid to scupper talks. They have also underwritten profits to shield rail companies from the impact of strike action.
The group now complaining it cannot afford ticket offices represents private companies that raked in £310 million from 2020-22 in publicly subsidised profit. Executive salaries have soared while rolling stock companies leech out billions in shareholder dividends.
These people should not be allowed to plead poverty to attack ticket offices — and render our railway system still less accessible, especially for disabled and elderly passengers.
Their true motive is to break rail workers, seen as a vanguard of the labour movement and among the most determined battalions of the strike wave.
The cost will not just be paid by those workers and the travelling public. The forced degradation of the rail system is their model too for our postal service and our NHS.
And it is a nail in the coffin of any green transition. It has to be defeated.
