Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 31st of

October, Halloween, but I'm not going to dwell on the mysteries of that celebration. I'm going to look at

something much more prosaic, which is station ticket offices. You may well by now be aware of

what the government has done. And I'm going to run through the sequence of events as I see them.

And you will be aware, I think also, of the very strong feelings of some people. So there has been,

for just getting on for 19 months now, an incredible dispute running between, well, the main rail

unions, the RMT, and as left, the train drivers union, and they are engaged in a very, very bitter dispute over pay and working arrangements.

And they're in that dispute with the 14 train operators who are contracted by the Department for Transport to run train services.

And as I've mentioned before, the main issue is they want a decent pay rise

with no preconditions. The government says you can only have a bit and you're only getting that

if you agree to substantial changes in the way that you work. So with that as the background,

the government, about a year into the dispute, thought, well, we've got to do something to avoid the fact that the rail industry is costing the taxpayer a fortune.

What can we do? We could redeploy station staff.

So they said to the train operators, they're represented by the rail

delivery group, can you go off and come up with proposals for closing ticket offices, please?

And guess what? The rail delivery group did exactly that. They went off and they said,

yep, we can see how we would do this.

And we now need to put it out to a consultation to the public,

because that's always the way whether you're closing one or 1,000 ticket offices,

you put it out for public consultation.

The public, and in particular disability campaigners and trade unions

and people represented older travellers.

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