Ticket Office Motion

CITY Councillors have unanimously backed a motion opposing rail ticket office closure.

Rail companies are set to close most ticket offices across the country, but many fear it will hit the vulnerable and elderly who may need the assistance of ticket office staff.

Introducing the motion at the recent full council meeting, Gabriel Leroy, Labour councillor for Kursaal Ward, said: “This policy to close all but one of our ticket offices is a disastrous knee-jerk policy affecting blind, disabled and elderly people.

“Furthermore it is clear, with the frequent outages of the smartcard system and unreliable ticket machines, that this will have a widespread impact on the morning rush and may leave chaos at our stations as we’ve seen in Basildon during the trials.

“There’s been an incredulous lack of investigations into the potential effect of this policy and this motion will seek to invite c2c and Greater Anglia to this council to thoroughly scrutinise these closures.

“I’ve received assurances that c2c intend to accept any invitation. With the consultation having ended, I’m confident residents have shown their complete opposition to these measures.”

Daniel Cowan, leader of the Labour Group, said: “It’s vital to our community that ticket offices continue to be staffed.

“We know the issues that will be caused for people with disabilities or those disproportionately disadvantaged by digitalisation. We know that the user experience at ticket machines is poor and that they can be slow, inefficient and unreliable.

“Closing ticket offices will be severely detrimental to all railway users. This will not make things better it will make things demonstrably worse for those travelling alone, for those travelling at night, travelling with a disability, travelling without a smart phone or when the machines invariably break down.”

Kevin Buck, councillor responsible for highways, transport and parking, added: “I am grateful for this motion because I’m unclear why central government have brought this forward at this time.

“I do believe we’ve possibly put the cart before the horse because without any judgement on the principles of the policy, I think we’ve all heard that the infrastructure and the IT simply isn’t where it needs to be for any form of ticket office-less system.”

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