Slip on pigeon droppings? Have a payout of £28,000!

UNLUCKY commuters will be all too familiar with the threat of pigeons looming in the station rafters.

But one passenger got a lot more than a new suit after falling foul of the birds’ droppings – he or she was compensated £27,602 following a ‘possible’ slip on pigeon mess.

The commuter was awarded the huge payout by Network Rail after hurting a leg in the fall at Paddington Station.

The sum is just a fraction of the £1million paid out by the rail firm in the past five years for trips and falls at its stations in England and Scotland, according to data obtained by the BBC.

More than half the payouts were a result of accidents at London hubs – Euston, Paddington, Victoria and Liverpool Street stations.

The biggest compensation payout was £40,000 awarded to a passenger who had ‘slipped on some liquid and landed heavily on their right hip’ at Charing Cross station in London.

Other payouts for passenger slips included £36,392 at Paddington and £35,721 at Euston, while a commuter received £28,000 for a ‘possible lacerated finger’ at Liverpool Street.

Around £10,000 was also awarded to a passenger who slipped in a large puddle of water while crossing a bridge at Leeds station while £6,000 went to a passenger who slipped on ‘discarded tomato sauce’ on the concourse at London Liverpool Street, hurting their wrist and both knees.

The lowest figure paid by Network Rail was £10 to a passenger who slipped on ice at Victoria, ‘suffering personal injury and damage to their suit’.

Victoria saw the highest number of successful claims paid out by Network Rail with 44. Waterloo, with 32, Leeds, 32, Euston, 27 and Liverpool Street,

‘We rightly compensate’

24, also feature prominently. Guildford and Glasgow Central were the only Network Rail stations not to have had a compensation claim paid out in the past five years.

Network Rail said a ‘tiny fraction’ of commuters ‘experience a mishap’. The firm paid £951,360 in compensation in the five years up to the end of 2018-19.

Settlements made by Network Rail were said to take into account the wider impact as well as the injury.

Network Rail’s Philip Thrower said Network Rail took its ‘responsibilities seriously’.

He added: ‘With tens of millions of people using our stations every day, only a tiny fraction of a per cent experience a mishap.

‘If we are at fault for causing damage or injury to anyone, we rightly compensate them for those accidents and put in place new ways of working to stop them from happening again.’ Network Rail manages 20 stations across the UK including 11 in London, and others in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Reading, Guildford and Bristol.

And it isn’t only passengers that Network Rail has had to award compensation to.

In 2017, it was reported Scot-Rail had received £40million in compensation payments from Network Rail for disruption caused by engineering works.

Abellio ScotRail was given the money by the publicly owned track operator for two years of disruption caused by closure of the Queen Street tunnel and delayed electrification works on the Glasgow to Edinburgh line.