So I've just received a letter and email stating I have made too many claims so therefore some must be fraudulent. Before COVID I travelled into London every day and believe that none of my claims were false - it is not my fault GA's service is so appalling that I have to claim this repay to pay for the petrol used when my husband has had to use to collect me late at night from a random station. I have always had a paper ticket and although I did subscribe to a delay site I have always submitted my own claims. I can work through the spreadsheet they have provided but as has been said on this site I am cautious about providing information. Can anyone help, please?
To try and focus on what matters to you:
Greater Anglia (GA) have written to you because they think that the Delay Repay (DR) claims that you have made aren't in line with the rules. They might be right about this, or they might be wrong.
Broadly there are two issues which could mean that your claims are wrong:
- you never made the journeys that you claimed for. As you've said, if you can show that you were on the trains that you claimed for, then there's probably no problem: we'd expect GA to stop arguing.
- in some other way, you didn't follow the rules that GA give for claiming DR. As far as I can make out, these are explained (not particularly well) on GA's website at
https://www.greateranglia.co.uk/about-us/our-performance/delay-repay. In particular, you might want to look at what the website says here:
Compensation – get it with our Delay Repay scheme.
If you are delayed by 15 minutes or more, you can get compensation.
If you hold a valid ticket for your journey and you have been delayed by 15 minutes or longer when travelling with us you can claim delay repay compensation, no matter what the reason for the delay.
My italics - but my understanding is that this means the journey that you actually made, rather than the journey that you planned to make.
And
When our train services are disrupted our customers may be entitled to claim Delay Repay compensation under our Delay Repay scheme.
If you choose not to travel because of disruption on our network then you may hand your ticket in for a refund ( subject to terms and conditions of ticket issue) at your nearest staffed station or by following the procedure for refund set out when you purchased your ticket online.
My italics again. So if you chose not to travel then DR isn't the way to get compensation - you should have returned your ticket for a refund.
Before going on to what this means for you, you probably want to know what happens to other people after they have received this first letter from GA. Most of the people who have posted here for advice have decided that the best thing to do is to agree a financial settlement with GA. This settlement seems to be to agree to repay all the DR claimed (even claims which aren't mentioned in this first letter) plus a fee of some hundreds of pounds to cover the costs of GA's investigations. We have also seen a case where a settlement wasn't agreed because the person involved ignored GA's letters. That case has now been passed to British Transport Police who are investigating it under the Fraud Act. It's also my understanding (but I can't off the top of my head remember where I get this idea from) that in some cases where someone has made a lot of claims and can show that they were all genuine then GA have not taken further action.
So where does this leave you? If you can show that all your claims were genuine and for journeys that you made, then I think we would say that you should contact GA telling them this - and we would hope that GA would respond to confirm that they're dropping the matter. At the other extreme, if your claims aren't all genuine, we would recommend seeking a settlement: so far, GA does not seem to have refused a settlement when the terms of it are to their liking. And while that may be expensive, it brings matters to a conclusion.
But what if you are in between these extremes? From your comment about claiming DR to pay for the petrol when your husband has to collect you from a random station, it would seem that you were seeking compensation for disrupted journeys - but mistakenly claiming through the DR process. This takes you into something of a grey area: the consensus here seems to be that mistakenly claiming through the wrong process is not fraudulent (because fraud involves
intending to obtain something that you weren't entitled to, instead of doing it by accident), but it seems to me that to demonstrate that a claim was not fraudulent would be hard work.
So if you're in this grey area, then a lot depends on your appetite for risk. If you can face the fight, then it may be worth arguing with GA: in my understanding they would not be able to prosecute you for fraud, but you would have to fight hard to get them to understand this. Or you may decide that it's simpler to pay an out of court settlement to make the issue go away. And that must be a decision for you, rather than for us.