‘Give rail commuters season ticket refunds’

‘Unprecedented’ SWR strike means passengers should get compensation, insists watchdog

RAIL commuters suffering one of the longest strikes in living memory should get season ticket refunds, a passenger watchdog has said, as a survey exposed the Christmas “misery” it has inflicted.

Transport Focus said the “unprecedented”

scale of the industrial action on South Western Railway (SWR), which started at the beginning of the month and is set to run into the New Year, meant passengers should get “special compensation” worth a month’s fares.

The call comes as the independent watchdog found that over half (62 per cent) of SWR passengers had had a journey affected by the industrial action and a quarter had been forced to cancel plans.

A survey of just under 300 commuters found people had been forced to stay in hotels or with trains after becoming stranded by the strikes, while others said they missed Christmas parties and family events.

Parents also reported not being able to get home in time to see their children before they went to bed, for days on end, with some saying the strike meant they regularly did not get back home until gone 9pm.

One commuter from Thames Ditton, Surrey, said: “The revised timetable has increased my journey. This now means that I can’t see my children in the evenings or read them a story before they go to bed. They are suffering because of the selfish actions of a few.”

Transport Focus said passengers with ad hoc tickets should also be entitled to special compensation, after proving a pattern of travel during the industrial action period.

SWR has had to cancel almost 850 trains between Waterloo and the South East, around half its schedule, during the 27-day strike by the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union, due to a dispute over the role of train guards.

Currently, SWR passengers can claim refunds if their journey is delayed by more than 15 minutes or if disruption means they can’t travel.

Train operators have previously paid special compensation to passengers for serious disruption, such as after the Northern timetable fiasco, in which there were three weeks of delays in the North West in May 2018. Following the debacle, which prompted Manchester’s mayor Andy Burnham to call for Northern to be stripped of its franchise, some affected passengers were offered a month’s refund as recompense.

Transport Focus said it would only usually call for special compensation in situations where the operator was clearly at fault. However, it said the “unprecedented” nature of the SWR strike meant passengers were entitled to additional compensation.

Anthony Smith, chief executive of Transport Focus, said: “Yet more strikes are being dumped on passengers who may have already to cancel Christmas holiday plans and endure miserable journeys to work.”

A spokesman for SWR said: “Our current focus is solely on getting our customers where they need to be over