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 | You and Yours - Transcript BBC Radio 4 |
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| TX: 01.10.08 - Disabled Rail Passengers PRESENTER: SHEILA MCCLENNON |
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| Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. MCCLENNON But first if you booked a hotel room, a taxi, a doctor's appointment, in fact any service, 24 hours before you needed it and were told you'd get that service you'd expect it to be there when you needed it. But for more than a third of disabled rail passengers who contact the Assisted Passenger Reservation Service - a system which should mean there's someone at the station to meet and help them - it doesn't happen. The consumer organisation Passenger Focus sent out mystery shoppers on various journeys, their report concludes that too often they're let down by rail companies' failure to provide assistance with many left stranded on the platform or abandoned on the train. Rosemary Bolinger, a wheelchair user and a trustee at Scope, is from a non car family and uses trains frequently, she told us about some of the problems she's encountered. BOLINGER I've lived in Eastbourne now for seven years and I very regularly travel both along the coast, around Canterbury and up to London and so use trains very regularly. I'd like to say that it's as I remember using trains when I was able bodied, it isn't though, it's a very stressful experience. I do normally pre-book assistance and certainly my local station - they're always very helpful. But when you are getting towards your destination and you're in a wheelchair you do begin to have the various scenarios running through your head as to whether they're going to remember that you're there, whether anybody's going to care. I haven't yet, touch wood, actually been carried by my station, although I have to say the last time I travelled into St Pancras it was a close run thing as to whether I ended up in St Albans instead of being assisted off, luckily an able bodied passenger on the platform noticed that I was having problems. MCCLENNON Rosemary Bolinger and her experience of using trains. Well I'm joined now by David Sindall, who's head of Disability and Inclusion at ATOC, that's the Association of Train Operating Companies which runs the Assisted Passenger Reservation Service. And Jocelyn Pearson, the Passenger Link Manager at Passenger Focus. So this research, Jocelyn, which you carried out, was that because you'd had a lot of complaints from disabled passengers about being let down? PEARSON Yes there were a lot of complaints from passengers but also a lot of organisations had done research already that said there was something not quite right. So we decided to try and find out exactly what was going wrong and how often it was going wrong. MCCLENNON And what did you find? PEARSON Well we found that in some cases, even though they'd booked 24 hours in advance, passengers didn't get any assistance at all. Sometimes they got assistance but not actually as they booked it but in some cases they do actually get the service that they book but it's just unreliable. MCCLENNON David Sindall, you run this service, the Assisted Passenger Reservation Service, or APRS, does that assistance fail to materialise in a third of all requests that they found, why would it go wrong, because it sounds quite simple - if someone phones up 24 hours in advance, why wouldn't there be somebody there to meet them when they need it? SINDALL Well there are a lot of reasons why assistance might go wrong and we quite welcome the findings in the Passenger Focus Report. But I think you've got to look at the report in the context in which it's placed, in the sense that not all passengers need assistance, our research with disabled persons railcard holder indicates that about maybe one in three passengers require research - require assistance rather. And there's a bigger problem too and that bigger problem is that not enough people know that assistance is available and we need to make people more aware of the assistance that is out there. MCCLENNON Surely the point David is not how many people need help but that the people that do book that help in advance one in three of them is getting it, two out of three are being let down. SINDALL Well that's not quite true as well because we know, for example, that in phase two of Passenger Focus's research about three quarters of people indicated they were happy with the support that they got and we know that there are improvements to be made. But what we really are keen to do now is actually concentrate on how we can further improve the system. Last night, for example, Colin Foxall, who's the chairman at Passenger Focus is on the record at a fringe meeting in Birmingham as saying that he recognises that the British rail system is probably the best rail system in Europe in terms of the way we support disabled people. That doesn't mean that we're complacent, it just means that we do have a lot to build upon and we do need to provide better passenger services to disabled and elderly people. MCCLENNON So Jocelyn, according to David, your mystery shoppers were just unlucky. PEARSON No the industry knows that the system is unreliable at the moment. You can have some really good journeys and you can have some really not very good journeys. And the real goal here is to get it consistent because when it's good it is good but passengers get made very anxious, very nervous, if they're never sure. In your lead in piece the passenger there was saying you know you start worrying before you arrive at the station - will they get me off this time - well that's not good enough, it's not good enough for passengers and I know the industry's not satisfied with its performance either. MCCLENNON Isn't there a legal obligation for the rail industry to cater for disabled passengers Jocelyn? PEARSON Yes there is and this is part of the way that the industry serves passengers with disability. It's one of the reasons why it's so important that we get this right, that they get this right for passengers. And passengers are just saying we're booking 24 hours in advance, we do deserve reliability on this. MCCLENNON David Sindall, it's the communication between the different train companies that seems to be a recurring obstacle and that came up in the research, in a station there can be several different platforms, all of which can be run by a different train company, how would you improve the system? SINDALL Well one of the things that's missing from the research is any mention of franchising and it's interesting I think that the passenger you featured in your report travelling from Eastbourne would be covered by the franchise that operates either at Victoria - the South Central franchise. The issue, as we see it, is that when the franchise - that's the terms and conditions on which a train operating company operates a let - that there should be greater attention given to a focus on providing better services for older and disabled passengers. MCCLENNON So if you've identified the problem why aren't you improving it? SINDALL Oh but - well we are, for example, in the next 12 months we're going to have a much better system in place that will provide better passenger information at stations, so that passengers can get more information about station layouts, about, for example, where they can be met and so forth. This will be available not just for passengers but also for rail staff and I know that one of the points in Passenger Focus's report is that basically we need to improve communication. The other thing about that building block that we have for our new station journey planning tool that we'll have in place by - in about a year's time - is it gives us a basis upon which to build a better system and we're really keen to talk to colleagues at the Department for Transport and work with Passenger Focus to actually see what we can do to improve the quality of delivery. Because in the end we want more disabled people to see rail as being a viable choice and to make journeys by trains. MCCLENNON And Jocelyn, briefly, happy with that? PEARSON This service is being offered today and passengers have a right to believe that they're going to have a reliable service, it's not reliable at the moment, something needs to be done right now. MCCLENNON Okay thank you both. Back to the You and Yours homepage The BBC is not responsible for external websites |
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