Passenger Assistance and Lift Failures

Approaches to DR UK show that there are many instances of passengers not receiving the Passenger Assistance help they had booked.

While the positive news is that satisfaction shows 94% of passengers are satisfied with the assistance they received, at least 11% of the 8,700 people who participated in a recent survey had not received assistance at all when requested, and a large proportion of this is due to station infrastructure.

The Office for Rail and Road have noted a 9% increase in lifts failures in the past year, with a 42% increase in the number of faults which put lifts out of service for more than a week leading to 396 incidents reported forcing Network Rail to share an improvement plan to tackle the lift failures.

Stephen Brookes, DR UK Transport Policy Adviser said ‘For those using Passenger Assistance, lift failures are a major barrier and, as I know by experience this is compounded by the extreme difficulty in finding any live lift updates on station information websites’.

‘We are told that Network Rail outsources its lift and escalator maintenance to Stannah, and a contract is due to run for the next five years, so we require a better response and more open easy to find information on what is a key area of station accessibility’