UK train companies could have to pay disabled passengers more compensation after rule change
Railway operators in the UK could soon have to pay out far greater sums in compensation to disabled passengers left unable to access trains despite booking assistance.
The rail regulator, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), has warned companies running trains and stations that compensation claims for failures can no longer be limited to the cost of a ticket.
The ORR is set to toughen up accessibility rules after a disabled passenger was awarded about 10 times as much by a court than by the rail ombudsman – £1,200 instead of £125 – after pre-booked assistance to board a train failed to materialise.
Passengers with disabilities can request help with luggage, navigating stations and getting on and off trains, including the provision of ramps if needed, through the Passenger Assist service. It is bookable up to two hours before travel, but people report having often been left stranded on trains and platforms.
Tanni Grey-Thompson, the former Paralympic athlete, last year became stranded at King's Cross station and dragged herself off the train before yelling for help.
Campaigners and lawyers have argued that railway policies and compensation do not reflect the breaches of equality law nor the levels of distress suffered.
The ORR has written to the industry to consult on changes after claims made by Doug Paulley, a disability rights campaigner, who was attempting to catch the Caledonian Sleeper night train service to Scotland from London Euston station in March 2023.
Paulley, 47, who uses a wheelchair, had booked assistance which did not arrive. Although he did eventually board with the help of train staff, he said the incident left him stressed.
He started a claim against Network Rail through legal avenues and the Rail Ombudsman. The ombudsman awarded Paulley, from Wetherby, Yorkshire, £100 for the assistance failure and £25 for complaints handling. He refused, and was eventually awarded £1,325 in the courts for the same incident.
He said: 'I'm basically on a crusade to make the industry have to pay proper compensation for assistance failures. It isn't a customer services issue, it is illegal discrimination. It has a massive impact on disabled travellers.
'Assistance failures are still so regular that it is clear the industry doesn't care sufficiently about them to make them 'never incidents'. I feel such failures should be given the same status and priority as safety incidents.'
Under the Vento banding system for payouts, the minimum 'damages for injury to feelings' – covering discrimination under the Equality Act – is £1,200. Paulley said: 'If rail operators get hit in the pocket for £1,200-plus for each assistance failure, this may help concentrate minds somewhat.'
Claire Hann, a solicitor at the law firm Leigh Day, sent the ORR a letter before action highlighting the case of Paulley. She said: 'Unfortunately Mr Paulley's case is not unique – it's a widespread issue and it impacts many disabled passengers.
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'It's not just that they miss the train, it's that they are put in a vulnerable position, which can lead to distress, and ultimately affect whether they trust they can travel safely and independently. '
The ORR said that, while most passenger assistance was done well, there were too many failures. A 2023-24 passenger satisfaction survey found that 5% of travellers using Passenger Assist were unable to complete their journey because assistance did not arrive. However, only 23% of those affected sought compensation.
The regulator said its focus was to ensure passengers got the necessary assistance, but made clear that compensation payouts should now be considered individually and not limited to the fare paid.
Stephanie Tobyn, the ORR's director of strategy, policy and reform, said claims should be compensated on case by case, adding: 'We've listened to affected passengers and we believe it is right to review redress policies for failed passenger assistance.'
A spokesperson for Rail Delivery Group, which represents station and train operators, said it wanted to 'build a more accessible, inclusive railway', adding: 'We want every passenger to travel with confidence, and we are committed to improving the reliability of assistance across the network. While we acknowledge that challenges remain, we know how important it is to get this right every time.'
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Thank heavens for Louise Casey. A report this week by the Baroness of Awkward Truths, which found that public bodies covered up horrific evidence about Pakistani-origin rape gangs 'for fear of appearing racist', has forced another humiliating reversal on Sir Keir Starmer. The smell of burning rubber is never far from our handbrake-turn Prime Minister, who has now accepted Casey's recommendation for a national inquiry. He had insisted that wanting such an investigation into those heinous crimes, the worst scandal in British history no less, was evidence you were marginally to the Right of Genghis Khan, or possibly even Tony Blair. Some 364 MPs shamefully voted against a statutory inquiry, including Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips who couldn't do enough for the traumatised victims until she stabbed them in the front. Baroness Casey's findings brought back an emotional encounter I had as I was leaving an event earlier this year. 'Forgive me for asking, Miss Pearson, but what happened to the British men?' The silver-haired American in sports jacket and tie in front of me had a concerned look on his face. I had just appeared on a panel discussing the Pakistani rape gangs chaired by Mark Steyn, who had campaigned relentlessly for their victims when he was a presenter on GB News. Survivors Sammy Woodhouse and Samantha Smith, my fellow panellists, had told the international audience about the ordeal they, and thousands of other British girls, had lived through. Not just being raped and tortured as children, but later stigmatised as prostitutes, criminals and liars in their twenties when they finally plucked up courage to speak out. Sammy recalled that police in Rotherham colluded openly with her abuser, Arshid Hussain, buying his drugs and tipping him off when he was about to have his collar felt. When officers found Sammy in bed with 'Ash', a 24-year-old British Pakistani, they arrested her for possessing an offensive weapon (which was his). The serial rapist with a rumoured string of more than 50 under-age girls in his highly-profitable harem was not held by police. Sammy was 14 at the time and pregnant. Still a child, then, although childhood and the bubbly, bright little girl who dreamed of being a professional dancer were long gone. After those two brave, articulate women up on stage finished telling their stories of almost surreal depravity, Steyn's audience – Aussies, Kiwis, Canadians, Americans, Brits – sat in horrified silence. Not quite silence; a lot of people were crying. A question hung in the incredulous air. How could the UK have allowed such monstrosities to happen to its kids and then allow it to be covered up for years until victims-turned-campaigners, like the two Samanthas, fought tooth and nail to bring it to public attention? Clearly, that's what was bothering the American. He was desperate to understand why British men had not protected their girls. 'See, where I come from, if they'd done that we'd have picked up our guns and…' I nodded. (To be fair, in the UK, when the Pakistani groomers briefly targeted Sikh girls, outraged Sikh men picked up baseball bats and taught them a lesson.) What to say? How do you account for a warped ideology that has taken hold in your country, a fatal blend of cultural incompatibility on the one hand and institutional cowardice and fear of 'Islamophobia' on the other? 'Many of the girls were in care or they came from troubled homes, so often they didn't have fathers to help them,' I began falteringly. 'Sammy's dad did try to rescue his daughter from a house where she was trafficked and police threatened to arrest him, not the groomers.' 'What the hell?!,' exclaimed the American. 'Exactly. What the hell. It's really to do with political correctness,' I went on. 'The Labour Party, which ran most of the towns where the grooming gangs operated, became dependent on Muslim votes and they were very reluctant to have the Pakistani community criticised. So the white, working-class girls (' who must have been asking for it') were not believed even though what was happening to them was evil. And anyone who dared to speak up for them was damned as 'racist', which was hugely damaging obviously, so mainly people stayed silent. Essentially, white kids were sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism. It was Votes for Girls, that was the deal.' (Revealingly, in an interview for this week's Planet Normal, Sammy Woodhouse told me that her abuser, 'Ash', was fully aware of the protected status he enjoyed as a British Pakistani Muslim, and happily exploited it. 'I'll just play the race card,' he used to say.) One thing I didn't mention to that American guy was the complicit role played by the media, notably the BBC, and others in the metropolitan bubble. Until 2013, when Andrew Norfolk of The Times revealed Sammy Woodhouse's story (with characteristic courage the Yorkshire lass waived her anonymity), the overwhelming evidence that Pakistani Muslim men preyed on 11-year-olds whom they disdained as 'white slags' was simply not admissible in polite society. (Even the heroic Norfolk, who sadly died a few weeks ago, initially held back on publishing because he feared the story was catnip to the far-Right). But Sammy had lifted the lid on child sex exploitation cases in her home town, prompting the Alexis Jay report which identified at least 1,400 victims in Rotherham alone. I vividly recall some of the hostile media reaction two years later to a previous take-no-prisoners Louise Casey report into opportunity and integration. The one in which the Baroness criticised public institutions that 'have ignored or even condoned regressive, divisive and harmful cultural and religious practices for fear of being branded racist or Islamophobic'. The Rotherham child abuse scandal, Casey concluded, was 'a catastrophic example of authorities turning a blind eye to harm in order to avoid the need to confront a particular community'. In the impeccably-liberal Prospect magazine, reviewer Oliver Kamm shuddered fastidiously. He condemned Casey's striking honesty as a 'vapid and ill-conceived intervention' which might have been designed to appeal to – quick, pass the smelling salts! – Farage and anti-immigrant tendencies. 'It warns that segregation and social exclusion are at 'worrying' levels,' Kamm complained. 'And it does so… without indicating what it would accept as countervailing evidence.' Such wilful blindness by members of a liberal elite to the problems posed by 'a particular community' continues to this day. Not long ago, in an interview for The News Agents podcast, former BBC maven Emily Maitlis attacked Rupert Lowe (ex-Reform MP, now an independent who has set up a separate inquiry with Sammy Woodhouse) for obsessing about Pakistani grooming gangs 'because probably you are racist and you don't believe there are white perpetrators'. It is Maitlis's sneering brand of superior ignorance, her arrogant stigmatising of critics of failed integration, that created the climate that allowed Pakistani perpetrators to continue violating the Samanthas and tens of thousands of other young girls with almost total impunity. Racism being a far worse crime than child-rape in the best circles, darling. The Home Office data which Maitlis drew on – saying most group-based child sexual offenders are white – always seemed absurd. (A quick look at the police mugshots for most grooming-gang trials quickly told you that white men, although heavily represented among paedophiles, were not the major villains in the trafficking of pre-teen and teenage girls.) How marvellous to see our Islamist-friendly Home Office thoroughly debunked in this new report from Baroness Casey. 'This audit found it hard to understand how the Home Office [2020] paper reached that conclusion, which does not seem to be evidenced in research or data.' Oops. Astoundingly, in our interview, Sammy Woodhouse recalled that 'in council safeguarding meetings, when I was a child who was being raped by a 24-year-old Pakistani man, there was an anti-racism co-ordinator'. That tells you everything you need to know about the priority of Labour authorities – and it sure as hell wasn't protecting innocent little girls. Keir Starmer must have had high hopes that Louise Casey would save him from the acute political embarrassment of the authorities in Muslim-voting Labour areas coming under scrutiny. (She had indicated she opposed a national inquiry.) What Labour really fears, I suspect, is that the discovery of a widespread cover-up of the industrial-scale rape of British children will pose existential questions about the ability of certain British Pakistani men to ever integrate into a society where women and girls are created equal. That's what Sammy Woodhouse thinks – she says any dual-national child-rapists must be deported. And which of us would disagree? 'I don't think this inquiry is going to get the justice that we need,' Sammy told me, 'because it's Labour investigating Labour. They're just chucking this out there to keep us quiet.' I pray that she's wrong, I pray that all her passionate campaigning for the ones who couldn't fight as she has fought pays off. Let's hope we will need to build new jails to house all the cowards who covered up for the rape gangs. Police, councillors, social workers, MPs, community leaders. Grown men who allowed little girls to endure such fathomless depravity. At least they will be sleeping less well tonight thanks to the Baroness of Awkward Truths.
