North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

.... and whthedr you're content to rely on thye advice of a volunteer or insist on incurring professional fees?

 

The Act is unequivocal about the right to compensation or refunds. The "may" relates to the extent to which the service provider has failed to provide what can reasonably be expected ie. 15 minutes late on a heritage railway.....No compensation, but 45 minutes late or the train was cancelled...different matter!

 

One advantage of published T&Cs is that it will limit a railways liability, in particular for consequential loss. Eg if a train is late and a passenger therefore misses an onward public transport connection to an airport which then causes the said passenger to miss their flight then is the railway liable for the cost associated with the potential overnight costs and the rebooking rebooking of the flight?

The problem is that intending passengers read timetables as hard and fast. Eg travelling on the NYMR Pickering to Whitby and complaining when a train is late into Whitby that they are then going to miss their prebooked meal, or travelling to Pickering and the train is late causing them to miss the last bus to York and “what an I going to do about it?”, or “who do I see about compensation”. All real life examples I have experienced, where I have tried to help the passenger to the best of my ability but ultimately pointing them back to Customer Services.

 

I might dispute the "increased familiarity with delay repay" comment.
Last survey I read the results of said only 40% of the population ever travel by train. Add to that based on contacts locally (mainly via my wife) many who do travel by train are not aware of it. Plus the whole thing is not standardised, 15 minutes start point on many TOC's 60 minutes XC and TFL suicide (sorry PHBT to be PC) I believe are excluded by TFL, some of whose services run parallel with GWR and GA where it is not. So a 15 minute delay from Paddington to Reading is paid by GWR but it needs to be an hour on an Elizabeth Line service. You need to be a nerd to remember all this stuff.
So what are these people familiar with?, that is before you get TOC's auto systems just rejecting claims and people giving up.

 

Passengers (sorry you according to NR now) may have a claim for late arrival but not for any consequential loss, in the same way the airline will say tough luck if your connecting train or bus was late, "you should have left more time".

Same as the railtour argument, if you have a CME ticket from Euston the contract is to get you back to Euston, not Bromley South or Brighton. Anything beyond Euston is totally at the choice of the service provider.

 

I think you’re creating a mountain out of a molehill. I can see no justification whatever for a delay repay scheme, but self evidently there will be occasions where the performance of the railway falls short of what you would like and your commercial team will need to address that shortfall. Under no circumstance would I ever start down the road of delay repay though for a heritage railway, why are you even hinting at this to the customer? There are other remedies available. Common sense (which in my 30years in business has always been more important than the T and Cs) seems absent.

 

As a lawyer I would always caution against just saying "common sense should apply" but I do agree that the decision to decide that delay repay should apply is very strange and something I would not have ever recommended implementing without specialist advice- if nothing else because of the potential implications for the rest of the sector. I'm not a consumer protection expert, but my view would be that there are plenty of ways of avoiding the application of Section 56 in the case of delayed trains on heritage railways, and I would be surprised to see any railway implementing it without very careful thought and external support.

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Wise words, but then you're not part of the NYMR's SMT!

 

The term profit might be confusing for NYMR .Perhaps asking the size of the loss might elicit a response ?

 

Indeed. In fact my interest in following this thread in recent weeks was mostly because we are staying near Levisham in April and therefore I am hoping for my first visit to the NYMR since 2018 and am rather startled to find how much it is going to cost, and that we won't even be able to get an annual pass meaning that we likely will only be able to go once rather than twice...

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I refer you to the post by @Platform 3. I’m not suggesting what you think I am, I am suggesting precisely what he said. Knowing the customers of heritage railways really quite well I cannot conclude that a delay repay scheme is a sensible response and the provisions set out for redress by the MHR and others I think fully comply, but if you had a particularly vociferous individual you might choose to apply common sense regardless of what your terms say!

 

Yes, I’m sure we are all too familiar with the concept of the particularly vociferous individual! So, it seems you accept that customer services, or whoever else makes the decision, should have a policy about what compensation will be considered, in what circumstances and when refunds may be offered in compliance with the legislation. The difference between us is that would be kept secret from passengers until they complain. Of course in those circumstances you couldn’t assert that levels in the policy formed part of the contract with the passenger. How do you also comply with the obligation to refer consumers of the railway’s services to an ADR service provider if they so require other than presumably by making an attractive offer?

 

That isn’t what I said. I have been very clear that you have to a policy which is available to the customer in the form of T and Cs. I have also been very clear that I would not go near a delay repay scheme and that I would not in any way offer to run the advertised services at the times stated. The commercial team may find that occasionally they need the authority to refund a customer or customers. Your policy is taking a steam jackhammer to crack a nut. Because you will only end up facing a demand such as the one you’re postulating if you have first been so bloody unreasonable with the customer as to either not recognise a genuine complaint or not given your teams the permission to refund when such a complaint justifies it, or you have failed to deliver a service AND failed to provide a solution (like cancelling the return leg of a train to Whitby and not finding road coaches to cover the service or whatever). Offering delay repay is not necessary and I would venture to suggest might be regretted both by the NYMR and the wider heritage community.

 

It sounds as if in practice the two railways are not really that different in their approach. As I made clear some posts ago the NYMR does not offer delay /repay in the form that applies to TOCS on the national network. All it does, in compliance with the 2015 Act, is state in its terms and conditions when compensation, and in some cases a refund can be claimed. It seems the MHR also has a policy on that which forms part of its T&C's. Those are "available to the customer" but is that beforehand, so they become a potential limit on liability, or only after a customer complains in which case they could not be? Presumably if the customer requests a reference to the ADR service provider the MHR would provide it with the details of its compensation and refund policy?

 

How does your policy interact with the "free returns for Gift Aid passengers"?

It seems there are two possible scenarios:

• Passenger pays the Gift Aided fare. The service on the day goes to hell in a handcart - are they eligible for compensation, and if so how much? The service that day may have been lousy, but in terms of service delivery, that is only one day out of an entire year of potential travel opportunities.
• Passenger pays the Gift Aided fare. That day runs well, and maybe they also have several successful return visits. But then one day goes all wrong - so again, what are they eligible for? You have, after all, delivered a service to them successfully many times.

It feels an area that is fraught with complexity in that scenario to actually work out what the service is you are delivering, and therefore how bad things have to get before you can legitimately be said to be no longer delivering it.

Tom

 

An interesting question. The annual ticket is less of a problem now it’s not available, but a full or partial refund on what is legally a donation raises issues that might interest HMRC. At the very least, this raises the stakes for the quality of record keeping.

 

The law still treats, notwithstanding the 2015 act, a declaration of T&Cs as valid if they are included by reference rather than explicitly put under the customer’s nose. What’s changed is that a company can no longer advertise one thing, then provide something different saying “it’s in the conditions”.

While I agree that the treatment between the two is likely to be very similar, it feels to me as though NYMR has set a precedent for the sector that it’s peers might be uncomfortable with, especially when it’s done to them. I also note that this is the second such act by NYMR discussed on here, as the approach to opening windows exhibits similar features of a specific response to legal/regulatory pressure, but in a way that will set a sectoral precedent.

 

Indeed. It feels to me there is a bit of a magpie approach of alighting on bits and pieces of legislation from here and there, but without a very coherent view of how they all fit together as a whole.

Tom

 

If it'setting a precedent surely it's just one of responsible compliance with applicable law and regulations?