Social Research ¦ Market Research ¦ Behavioural Insight ¦ Evaluation ¦ SROI
Social Research ¦ Market Research ¦ Behavioural Insight ¦ Evaluation ¦ SROI
The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) is the independent safety and economic regulator for Britain’s railways. A condition of the operating licences that ORR grants to mainline train and station operators requires them to establish and comply with an Accessible Travel Policy (ATP). This ATP, which ORR approves, sets out in detail the arrangements that an operator will put in place to support disabled passengers. A key aspect of ORR’s regulatory work is to ensure that Train Operating Companies (TOCs) and Network Rail fulfil the commitments made to passengers in their ATPs.
Passenger Assist is a free service offered by rail companies providing passengers with disabilities or anyone else who may require help, with assistance to enable them to make their journey. Rail companies’ participation in Passenger Assist is mandated through their regulatory requirement to have an Accessible Travel Policy (ATP) approved by the Office of Rail and Road (ORR). The intent of Passenger Assist is to make rail travel accessible to everyone.
Passengers can request assistance by booking it in advance of their journey. Train and station operators can require bookings to be made at least 2 hours prior to travel. Passenger Assist is open to anyone who needs assistance; this could be due to a disability or long-term health condition, a temporary health issue or older age, and no ‘proof’ is required to demonstrate eligibility to use the service.
Assistance can take various forms – from being assisted into the station and help getting on and off the train (e.g. via ramps), to help with luggage, finding the relevant seat and or with moving around stations. The responsibility for the assistance at each station is with the designated operator of each station, known as the Station Facility Operator (SFO).
Since 2017 ORR has commissioned annual research by to investigate the extent to which Passenger Assist meets users’ needs and expectations, and to explore how well individual operators perform in terms of meeting their Passenger Assist obligations. ORR commissioned M·E·L Research Ltd to conduct another wave of this research for 2022-23 to support its ongoing compliance monitoring in this area and to build on the wider body of evidence about how well Passenger Assist is meeting user needs and expectations.
There are some complexities to dealing with this customer data.
When booking assistance, a record is created in the Passenger Assist database for each assist rather than for each journey, journey leg or each passenger. For example, a passenger travelling from London Euston to Birmingham New Street who requested help with luggage, and assistance boarding and alighting the train would have a record created for each assistance type requested at each station (so there would be four records created for the outbound journey – two at London Euston and two at Birmingham New Street – and a further four for any return journey – two at Birmingham New Street and two at London Euston).
However, to allow attribution of the results to a specific SFO, in this survey passengers are asked about assistance given at a particular station rather than across the entire journey (or indeed instead of their experience of the entire service over a period of time).
All users of the service who provided an email address were given the option to respond to the online survey, in order to encourage a high response rate, and robust analysis of subgroups within the data. A follow up round of telephone interviews were conducted for each Rail Period in order to collect interviews from users unable to complete an online survey, and to give all respondents to opportunity to participate in the manner they felt most comfortable with. Setting of quotas for the telephone phase ensured that interviews were being collected from users of all SFOs, including those which were under sampled in the online survey.
The Rail Delivery Group (RDG), who manage the Passenger Assist system, provided samples from their database on a monthly basis during this period.
The sample files contained a record for each assist booking rather than each passenger, which meant they needed to be de-duplicated. All elements were randomly selected for each participant to avoid sample bias: the leg of the journey; the station (start, finish, or interchange); and the type of assist.
8163 respondents in total completed the survey in 2022-2023, an increase from 5290 in 2021-2022 which was delivered by another provider.
MEL Research Ltd have been asked to continue to provide the service for the 2023-24 rail year. We provide a full report and presentation of findings to the ORR and this report has just been submitted, with a pre-presentation provided to senior internal ORR staff.
The data from this study is used to inform feedback to SFOs, and thus the robustness of sampling is paramount. In 2022-23, we weighted by both rail period (month, effectively) and TOC used for the journey, with an efficiency of 95% – strongly supporting our approach to sample management and quota setting throughout fieldwork.
The report is available here: https://melresearch.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/2022-2023-passenger-assist-report-by-mel.pdf
“You will have no doubt seen that we published your report on passenger assistance this morning. I just wanted to thank you for all your work in running the survey and producing the report. And give particular mention to the additional questions around the social model of disability that you suggested, which have really helped in terms of drawing out additional insights from the data; the much increased sample size that you managed to secure giving much greater confidence in the validity of the findings including when we disaggregate to individual TOCs; and your responsiveness to our feedback in pulling the final report together.” – Office of Rail and Road
