East Midlands Railway warned over calling off competition with £5,000 prize on offer
A TRAIN company has been reprimanded for cancelling its “build back better” competition and as a consequence withholding the £5,000 cash prize as it thought the public’s ideas “weren’t good enough”.
East Midlands Railway was found to have caused “unnecessary disappointment” to the more than 800 entrants who had sent in ideas on how to improve its services after the pandemic.
The Advertising Standards Authority dismissed the operator’s excuse that the standard of ideas had been too “poor quality” to award the prize and ruled it had breached competition standards.
Promoting the competition on Twitter in February, the company asked for ideas to improve “passenger wellbeing” once Covid restrictions were lifted.
Later, EMR announced on its website that it had been “overwhelmed with the level of passion and interest shown” and the “huge range of ideas” sent in.
However, EMR, which is owned by Abellio, a Dutch government-run company, then told customers that it felt it was “not the right thing to do” to spend money on a cash prize and implementing passengers’ ideas while the railways are being propped up by the taxpayer.
Abellio took over EMR months before the pandemic struck in 2019 promising to invest £600 million in the line, including in 165 new carriages.
In its submission to the ASA, the company said that it had decided not to pay out the cash prize as the competition had not generated any ideas that “would be suitable to be implemented”.
However, the ASA pointed out that the company launched the competition a year after the pandemic first struck and should have been able to “anticipate the challenges” of going ahead with it at that point.
It said that EMR did not appear to have appointed any judges to assess the ideas and that it could have still awarded the prize even if it didn’t think any were practicable. It added: “By cancelling the competition for the reasons given and not awarding the prize, Abellio had not dealt fairly with participants and had caused unnecessary disappointment.”