Ticketing and Concessionary Travel on Public Transport - United ...

Transport Committee: Evidence Ev 21
5 December 2007 Mr Roy Wicks, Mr Neil Scales, Mr David Cook, Mr Adrian Jones <strong>and</strong> Mr Greg Yates
Mr Yates: I think the achievements we have made in
Cheshire have been done with the assistance from
the Department, but we have only gone partly along
the road of being able to get a fully integrated
ticketing system in Cheshire <strong>and</strong> it is almost as if it
has been a very uphill struggle, despite the assistance
we had from the Department.
Q167 Chairman: You do not think the Government
is doing enough to help you develop an integrated
system, is that what you mean?
Mr Yates: Yes, I do. We have had some help, but it
has not gone far enough in terms of getting the
system spread across the whole totality of the bus
provision within Cheshire. We have got about 60%
of the way <strong>and</strong> I gather we are well ahead of other
areas in the country.
Q168 Chairman: Is there a national scheme for
integrated ticketing? I am not talking about the
st<strong>and</strong>ards for ITSO, but is there actually an
integrated scheme throughout the whole of the
United Kingdom?
Mr Wicks: No, Chairman. I think, as my colleagues
have said, the issue for us really, particularly in the
larger cities, is that even if you can achieve some
degree of integration within one bus company, the
problem we have is that we have buses <strong>and</strong> trams <strong>and</strong>
we are trying to operate a simple single ticket for
people. We do that <strong>and</strong> all of the PTEs oVer such a
ticket. The diYculty we have is that because it has to
be commercially negotiated the pricing of that ticket
has to be a suYcient distance in practical terms from
the operator’s own tickets. So in relation to oVering
an integrated product—which you can get in most of
our cities which allows you to travel anywhere by
bus, tram or train, or in my colleague Mr Scales’s
case even by ferry, I suspect—it is actually can you
price that ticket suYciently attractive for people to
take it up?
Q169 Mrs Ellman: How important are smartcards?
Could not improvements be made by improving the
existing paper systems?
Mr Wicks: Certainly—if I could start on that <strong>and</strong>
ask Mr Scales to come in—we think smartcards are
very important. You only have to see the success of
the Oyster card in London in encouraging people to
make more trips by diVerent modes of transport.
The Government is funding a pilot of smartcard
ticketing in SheYeld, which will get underway in
March, but I would not want to underestimate the
diYculties there are, compared with London, in
actually introducing such a scheme. In London, TfL
can take the revenue risk in eVect <strong>and</strong> the
consequences of that. We have had to negotiate with
all the bus <strong>and</strong> train operators to make sure they are
comfortable with the processes that you put in place
behind it. So, yes, smartcard is an important way of
getting people a good ticketing oVer, but there are a
lot of practical implications behind that to do with
the commercial deregulated market outside
London.
Mr Scales: Yes, they are easy to use. They are very
convenient for passengers because they are
contactless so you do not have to push them into a
slot on a vehicle or on a platform. Therefore, you get
reduced fraud; you get better data sets for planning
public transport going forward. As my colleague Mr
Wicks said, there is another pilot on the way now
<strong>and</strong> our colleagues in Scotl<strong>and</strong> are already rolling
out more than a million ITSO-compliant
smartcards. ITSO itself provides a framework,
which is Crown copyright, so it is open to everybody,
<strong>and</strong> that will allow diVerent manufacturers to bid for
smartcard projects. I think the English national
concessionary travel scheme with potentially 11
million cards in Engl<strong>and</strong> being introduced on 1 April
provides a good base for the smartcards, a suYcient
volume for other applications to get noticed, things
like banking applications, as is happening here with
Oyster, but you can extend them into local authority
uses such as library cards, access to schools. There
are lots of applications, so we think smartcards are
definitely a step in the right direction <strong>and</strong> ITSO
provides an interoperable framework which will
help that.
Q170 Mrs Ellman: Would that apply equally to the
non-metropolitan areas?
Mr Scales: Yes, indeed. There are 291 issuing
authorities in Engl<strong>and</strong>, all of which have the
operability to go for a smartcard-type solution,
maybe not now but in the future, <strong>and</strong> with support
from Government <strong>and</strong> our colleagues in the
Department for Transport we have set up ITSO
Services Limited, which will capture all the data on
the non-smart operations <strong>and</strong> when they go smart
then they get all the data sets back. So we have taken
adequate <strong>and</strong> suYcient precautions to protect the
data until they go into a smartcard solution.
Mr Jones: In Nottingham we have actually got the
highest take-up of smartcards outside London per
head, but we have got a problem in that there are
three separate smartcard systems which are not
compatible.
Q171 Chairman: Is that because they are not part
of ITSO?
Mr Jones: That is correct.
Mr Scales: They are Legacy systems, Chairman.
Mr Jones: Yes, so actually getting the operators to
agree to a common smartcard is really fundamental
to moving forward with integrated ticketing <strong>and</strong>
that is extremely hard to do, sometimes for
commercial reasons <strong>and</strong> sometimes because it is a
way of actually preventing the requirement for
integration if you have not got a smartcard system.
There are integrated tickets at the moment in
Nottingham which is quite successful—it is actually
a paper scratch card—even though we have got a
very high number of people with smartcards.
Q172 Mrs Ellman: Mr Wicks, in your evidence you
say that some of the commercial operators have
questioned the commercial benefits of smartcards,
some of the private operators. Why would that be?