Good morning. Today I got a very interesting response to a freedom of information request from Transport for Wales.
They pay almost £800,000 per year to an external contractor for "revenue protection" (which means enforcing ticket fines).
They earn ~£80,000 per year from ticket fines and penalty fares.
Which means they're paying ten times what they're making back from this process.
Edit: petition in thread
I made the FOI request because I had encountered teams of "revenue protection inspectors" several times over the summer. Each time, a group of three or more staff members boarded the train. And then either did literally nothing (stood around in the vestibule), or walked along asking for people's tickets (sometimes minutes after the conductor had done just the same), and then got off after a few stops.
It seemed like a ridiculous waste of staff and money, so I thought I would check. And it is!
Transport for Wales is (at least partly?) funded by the Welsh government. So this isn't just a nonsensical failure of capitalism, it's also a waste of actual taxpayer money.
The only reason I can think of for execs to approve of this is because it makes rich non-train-users feel better about being TOTALLY SURE that poor people aren't getting any free train rides.
Anyway I started a petition suggesting they put the money to better use elsewhere: https://petitions.senedd.wales/petitions/246387
@Averixus it’s the deterrent. Around here, the college kids often jump on the train without paying because they don’t think they’ll get caught.
Agreed that it's hard to measure value of interventions in an adversarial situation (because their existence changes the adversary's behaviour). Given that TfW apparently also has conductors I don't see how the additional deterrence would be significant.
BTW for context, it seems that TfW is getting ~120Mpounds per year from tickets out of ~700Mpounds of revenue (which include some non-passenger services and mainly grants from various levels of government). Source: grep for "revenue from contracts" in https://tfw.wales/sites/default/files/2024-07/TfW-Annual-Review-24_ENG.pdf
@robryk @Sbectol @Averixus megapounds.
Now thats is one of the units of all time