Regulator’s report on rail assistance ‘shows it is still failing to acknowledge right to turn up and go’

The rail regulator has been asked why it has failed to do more in an annual report to stress disabled people’s right to “turn up and go” when accessing the railway network.

The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) released new figures this week which showed that satisfaction with booked passenger assistance on the rail network had plateaued, with one in 10 disabled passengers still not even being met at the station after booking help.

The proportion of passengers who received all the assistance they booked also remained stable in 2024-25 at just 78 per cent.

This was even lower for passengers with a “learning, concentrating or remembering disability” (73 per cent); with mental health conditions (72 per cent); those who are neurodivergent (72 per cent); and passengers with a communication impairment (73 per cent).

There were also figures showing what proportion of passengers were satisfied with the assistance they received, with the booking process, and with the helpfulness and attitude of staff.

But there were no similar figures to show the levels of satisfaction for disabled passengers who turn up at a rail station and request assistance with their journey without booking it in advance, which is their legal right.

The report on disabled people’s experiences of Passenger Assist was released alongside ORR’s Annual Rail Consumer Report.

Accessible transport campaigners have been highlighting for years the failure of the rail industry and successive governments to ensure disabled people’s right to spontaneous travel by denying their right to turn up and go (TUAG) across the rail network.

The ORR annual report appears to underline that failure by focusing on pre-booked passenger assistance.

It says only that it is “working with industry to strengthen the quality of data on turn up and go assistance requests”, and that it expects the “quality and completeness to improve over time”.

The only TUAG figures released by ORR this week show the number of TUAG requests made in 2023-24 and 2023-24 (about 312,000 in 2023-24 and about 491,000 in 2024-25), although notes published alongside these figures show they are likely to be unreliable*.

It is the first time such TUAG figures have been published.

Doug Paulley, one of the disabled activists who has highlighted the right to TUAG in his campaigning, said he had a “significant concern” about ORR’s “concentration on assistance booking rather than TUAG” in its “uninspiring” report.

He said ORR did not have reliable or useful statistics on how well rail companies were doing on TUAG.

He said: “Everything they measure or do is about booked assistance: satisfaction with booked assistance, recompense for failed booked assistance…

“It feels like they try to avoid mentioning or acknowledging our right to turn up and go.”

He said this was a “disturbing and counter-productive trend”.

Responding to these concerns, ORR said it was exploring with rail operators “how we might get a better picture of the experience of passengers who request assistance on demand”, including the potential for TUAG passengers to be asked to take part in its existing passenger survey of experiences of assistance.

ORR released figures in the Passenger Assist report that ranked each rail operator on their performance on booked passenger assistance.

It showed that Northern Trains was the worst performer, with only 70 per cent of disabled passengers who were met at the station then receiving all the assistance they had booked, with Transport for Wales (74 per cent) and West Midlands Trains (74 per cent) also performing poorly.

The best performer was London North Eastern Railway (85 per cent).

The annual report notes how ORR has raised concerns through the year about passenger assistance; the reliability of help points at stations; communications between staff at boarding and destination stations when arranging passenger assistance; the reliability of passenger lifts at stations; the provision of accessible rail replacement vehicles; and the complaints process for disabled passengers.

The report points to annual data that shows a 42 per cent increase in the number of faults across the rail network that put lifts out of service for over a week, in 2024-25 compared with the previous year.

Commenting on the report, Stephanie Tobyn, ORR’s director of strategy, policy and reform, said: “Ensuring that disabled passengers consistently receive the support they need to travel by train requires clear focus, collaboration and a commitment to continuous improvement.

“Our latest survey shows that overall passenger satisfaction has plateaued, and we know that, in some instances, assistance failures can leave passengers feeling powerless and frustrated.”

She said that a new rating system on passenger assistance would “help us target our efforts and use resources effectively, focusing on working with those operators where improvement is most needed to deliver better outcomes for passengers”.

*ORR says in its notes that the only TUAG requests recorded are those noted by staff via the Passenger Assist system, while not all rail operators are yet using this system to record TUAG requests, and any requests booked less than two hours before departure are treated as TUAG

Picture by ORR

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