A review by Mark Rowe of the second Channel 5 documentary in the current season of Fare Dodgers: At war with the law.
The poet AE Housman once spoke of two things that a poem can hold for us: the meaning of the words, and the effect they have on our feelings. A television documentary of ‘front line’ occupations, usually the 999 services but here the revenue protection staff on the railways (in the first and third episode, from Transport for London) likewise has to be worth watching for the stories told; and the propaganda message to viewers, as intended by TfL or in this case the train operator South Western Railway (SWR). If the documentary is of a hospital delivering babies, the message is that our taxes are well spent on the National Health; if cops in cars chasing suspects, we can feel reassured that the police are protecting us or that crime doesn’t pay. SWT evidently wishes to give a message, having given permission for filming and publicising the documentary on its website.
In all that follows it’s important to stress that the blue-uniformed revenue protection officers, the boots on the ground, and the back-office staff, are not at fault. The dire state of the SWT routes and Britain’s railways generally is due to history and the progress in tech that has made fare evasion easier.
Ungated stations
London Waterloo has one of the largest and most impressive memorials to the dead of the 1914-18 war. Besides it mutely telling us about the sheer scale of the losses in World War One, it shows just how major an employer the railways were; only the young and able-bodied went to fight, and others staffed the stations still. Gone is the era of routinely staffed stations, to check tickets besides portering luggage; instead, in the jargon, suburban stations are routinely ‘ungated locations’, to use the rail jargon repeated in the documentary. In plainer English, anyone can walk onto a train without a ticket. Hence the main stations are gated, and staffed; at least at some point you can enforce ticketing. Except that, as the documentary showed early on by an operation at a gateline by some revenue protection officers, a passenger can buy a ticket from, say Clapham Junction (a station with gates, so you can’t claim to have boarded without a ticket) to Vauxhall, no matter how far away their journey began at an ungated station. Such fare evaders, when presenting themselves at a gateline, hold valid tickets.
Tech effect
A further baleful, or double-edged influence is tech. Mobile phones and apps and plastic payment cards make life so much more convenient; but they take away a weapon in the hands of revenue protection; the physical ticket, which they can confiscate (similarly, at football clubs, I once witnessed a stadium safety officer threaten to take off a drunk his season ticket). This aids the fare dodger who tail-gates (to explain more jargon; the fare evader walks closely behind a genuine paying passenger). The tapping on at gatelines with phones or plastic cards replaced a physical check of each ticket by staff; hence the railways can employ fewer people at gatelines, who deal with inquiries and are less able to intercept the tail-gaters.
Add rail operator policy to take away staff from stations to tech and (to use the ‘crime triangle’ theory) you have an opportunity for crime (to defraud the railways by not paying your fare), and motive (as explained early on by a revenue protection officer; some cannot afford the fares, while others can, ‘but can’t be bothered).
Inevitable abuse
SWT is far from the only train operator to have turned to Revenue Protection (a separate function from Security; the documentary showed yellow-uniformed Security only in passing, there to back up). As that implies, and as the documentary showed, Revenue Protection face swearing, besides tearful travellers once they’re suddenly confronted. While verbal or worse still physical abuse of workers is wrong, such responses are inevitable, because due to what retail loss prevention would call process failure. In other words, SWT has chosen to run its business by leaving gaps that fare evaders can exploit, like retailers who leave handbags or beer beside the door and then wonder why goods are stolen. Another dodge is to buy a half-price ticket with a railcard for those aged 16 and 17, though you’re over-age. Without a human check at the gate, you can present your ticket (no need to show the railcard) and according to the gate your ticket is valid.
Retail comparison
To continue with the retail comparison (which will suit the likes of SWT – gone is the nationalised railways idea of passengers, we’re now ‘customers’). The documentary gave a evasion rate of a quarter on the Portsmouth-Southampton line, where students in particular have regular short journeys that start and finish at small, unstaffed stations. Thanks to an ‘intensified clampdown’ that rate is down to seven per cent. To compare with retail, that rate loss has gone from catastrophic to merely hair-tearingly bad. A difference between retail and the railways is that in a shop you at least know what stock you should have for sale; do a stock-take (thanks to barcodes and other tech, you ought to know what’s on shelves at any moment) and you know what you actually have, and the difference is ‘shrink’, whether due to damage or theft. The railways lack that data because fare evaders either leave no trace, or pay for a short journey but should pay more for a longer one (and for all anyone knows, they’re the bigger evaders than the students paying a few pounds to college and back, as the documentary showed). To put it briefly and bluntly, any numbers about fare evasion (the documentary quoted £240m a year) are guesses.
Difficult recovery
A consensus is that fare evasion has got worse; how else to explain that fare income appears not to be keeping up with increased passengers? To add to the opportunity to offend, for whatever reason – covid, bad industrial relations, fear of being abused when confronting evaders – train guards check tickets on trains more erratically. That leaves revenue protection as the ticket checkers; better equipped for confrontation, such as with body-worn cameras. Except that they are not as numerous as guards, and cannot be everywhere at once. The documentary also showed how difficult it is for revenue protection – despite copious CCTV at gatelines, and digital data of ticket purchases – to first collar an evader and then recover money. Much was made in the documentary of a plain-clothes operation to stop a persistent evader, found to have evaded £19,500 of fares since 2022, by journeying from outside London, but only paying for Vauxhall to Waterloo, and with a discount from a railcard he wasn’t entitled to. The documentary recorded that the evader (not identified) had a first interview under caution and was told to expect a second interview (that he didn’t turn up to). In other words, a documentary meant (presumably) to deter others from evading showed strikingly little punishment of evaders, civil, let alone criminal. That the prisons are full and fare evading, if without violence, is hardly going to merit a jail sentence, any more than any other fraud, is too obvious to mention.
The only punishment suffered by most caught fare evaders appeared to be the mild sarcasm of the revenue protection officers (‘I’m surprised you don’t know your address’). The dramatic words of the documentary makers (‘an army of investigators’, ‘fraud sting’, ‘huge operation’ to catch a serial fare evader) fell flat.
Photo by Mark Rowe: street art, Waterloo, 2023.
