Transport User Voice March 2025 – Chief Executive’s editorial

28 February 2025

Working to support passengers

I spent a day this week as part of our accessibility training travelling around the West Midlands with a disabled passenger. It was eye-opening and in its own way shocking, partly because what we experienced was not unusual. 

There were some good, friendly staff who clearly liked talking to customers. And a couple who equally clearly didn’t but nonetheless fulfilled our Passenger Assist requests. But we experienced two significant failures. Firstly, we tried twice to use the Passenger Information point on the platform to let the train crew know, as you’re asked to, if you need help boarding. On both occasions the response was completely useless. We were transferred to a person who couldn’t hear what was being said and had no knowledge – at all – of either where we were or how to help. The closest we got to any sort of advice was being told to “make yourself known the train crew when the train arrives”. Ludicrous advice to someone waiting at an unstaffed station in a wheelchair.     

Secondly, the Passenger Assist we did book was working fine until we got to where we needed to get off and no one came to help us. We waited. Nothing. The doors shut and the train was about to pull away so we had to press the emergency button. Then someone came. We could easily have missed our stop and although the train wasn’t busy it was hard to not feel that everyone in the carriage was blaming us rather than the failed Passenger Assist for the delay.   

Some of you reading this who are disabled passengers, or who regularly travel with someone who is, will know this is common. Others, like me, may have had a sense of it but seeing it is quite different.    

We’re feeding back what we experienced to the operators, but these are clearly systemic issues. 

More than that, it reminded me that if the railway is ever going to make itself accessible to disabled passengers the people running it need to see for themselves exactly what happens when you try to use the service they say they’re providing.    

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