UK: The Office of Rail & Road has told Northern to submit a plan to improve the way it provides assistance to disabled passengers.
The operator rated poorly in the regulator’s latest survey of passengers who pre-booked additional assistance, with 18% saying the help requested was not received.
ORR said Northern had not provided assurance that it understood the causes of its poor performance, that it had robust plans for improvement, or that it had made progress against previous plans.
‘Northern Trains is not reliably helping disabled passengers on its trains’, said Stephanie Tobyn, ORR’s Director of Strategy, Policy & Reform, when the regulator wrote to Northern on September 19 calling for action. ‘It is important that Northern understands why this is, and reduces the risk of failing these passengers. While passengers regularly give positive feedback for Northern when it does get things right, doing this reliably remains a significant problem.’
In response, Northern Managing Director Tricia Williams said ‘we will be working closely with ORR on our improvement plan’. She said there had been a sharp increase in the number of people using the Passenger Assistance service in recent years, with more than 100 000 last year. ’Our focus now is to work on a detailed plan for improvement’, she said. ‘We will involve people with lived experience of disability through our Northern accessibility User Group, as well as staff, in our plans.’
