Examination of Witnesses (Questions 320-324)
MR SHASHI
VERMA AND
MR STEVE
BURTON
5 DECEMBER 2007
Q320 Chairman: What a good idea.
TfL you say has not reached the levels of performance in the area
of revenue protection to which it aspires. You are in total control
of that, better than anybody else anywhere in England. Does that
mean you are not very good at it?
Mr Burton: It does not. I would
say that, would I not? If you look at it the other way round,
we think levels of evasion on the network are about 3%, which
means pretty much 96 to 97% of the public are actually paying,
if you turn that around. We have some regulatory issues which
we have talked about already. We have differential regulations
between the modes. We think our officers could work much more
effectively if they had a legal right to find out someone's name
and address.
Q321 Chairman: Yes, we have done
that, but what training and supervision standards do you apply
to your revenue protection staff?
Mr Burton: They get very good
training including how to deal with confrontation, how the Oyster
system works, how the ticketing system works on the network. We
think they work very effectively. I think they do a very, very
good job and will keep the levels down very low. You can always
improve, which I know is always said, but you can. If we can get
the name and address stuff sorted out I think we can drive the
levels of evasion down even lower.
Q322 Chairman: How often do they
get assaulted?
Mr Burton: We have no more than
two assaults a month at the most. Again, I can write to you with
the details.
Q323 Chairman: I need your health
and safety records for your staff, I think, in relation to the
revenue protection. If you could tell us about the health and
safety regulations.
Mr Verma: Could I make a specific
point on the use of smartcards on revenue protection. As I said,
since the introduction of the Oyster card the money lost through
the system has reduced quite sharply. On the Underground particularly
the largest amount of loss of revenue is through the misuse of
concessions. So this is people who are not entitled to a concession
making use of the concession and the revenue collection effort
has focused very largely on that particular problem. All other
means of travelling without an appropriate ticket have largely
been taken into account in the design of the Oyster system. The
system is partially gated. It is not fully gated, despite some
miscomprehensions some people have. There are large parts of the
system which are not gated, including some very busy stations
like Finsbury Park, but the Oyster system is not designed to run
on a system which is fully gated. It is designed to run on a system
where a large proportion of the flows have one end gated, so either
the origin or the destination is gated, because we collect a maximum
cash fare when people enter the system and we refund them the
difference when they exit the system to bring the fare down to
the correct level.
Q324 Mr Hollobone: On the fare dodging
which does take place, to what extent is there serial fare dodging?
Is there a hard core of people who persistently try to evade their
fares, or is it lots of people making the occasional mistake?
Mr Burton: It is both types actually.
We have a small hard core of serial offenders, as you do in many
areas around antisocial behaviour. The way we deal with that is
we keep records of who we are issuing penalty fares to, which
is where the name and address would really help us. I have a prosecution
section within my department which takes a very active role in
taking people to court when we think that is the appropriate sanction
and we work very closely with the criminal justice system to ensure
there are appropriate sanctions in place. But yes, we do have
a small hard core of serial offenders and those are people whom
you will not change their behaviour by posters and they are the
people where enforcement and visible policing is a way to deal
with it.
Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you very much.
You have been very instructive.
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