It depends what you mean by “heavy handed”. Being charged a penalty fare is hardly the end of the world considering the alternative!
The fact that the railway has the (utterly disproportionate) power to privately prosecute doesn't make a Penalty Fare any less heavy-handed - particularly so after the recent increase to £50/100.
If there was no sanction there would be no incentive to buy a ticket at all, you’d just board the train without a ticket and only pay if challenged
Except there are revenue staff at Stansted nearly 24/7, and most of the stations on the route are barried. Nobody is going to be getting away with 'pay if challenged'.
(very easy with contactless as there’s no way to check whether a non blacklisted card has been tapped in).
Again, how many people actually know that? We might, but the average person doesn't. There's also no harm in checking that the card isn't blacklisted, and in causing a maximum journey charge and failed revenue inspection to be applied. This, plus charging someone the undiscounted single fare, is penalty enough in my view.
It’s clear that you disagree with the railway doing anything other than charging fares for people found without valid tickets (and then not having any actual ability to enforce even this).
Except I don't - that's just a conclusion you've jumped to in your head! There are certainly cases where Penalty Fares are appropriate - and such PFs can and should be enforced as a civil debt, as was always intended to happen. What is wrong is imposing them on people who unwittingly try to use an Oyster or contactless card to travel to Stansted, or issuing a Penalty Fare and then (immorally and often unlawfully) switching over to prosecuting because it's less effort than suing.
As a tax payer and railway user I’d like to see more revenue protection activity not less.
I am all for increased and consistent revenue protection; what I cannot support is dedicating huge amounts of resources to unfairly penalising 'low hanging fruit' such as this, whilst ignoring donutting and other more serious forms of fare evasion and antisocial behaviour.
As always with these discussions, it’s funny to notice how you are so relaxed about revenue lost to fare evasion/ticketing irregularities, but become hyper concerned about revenue being down the moment the subject of staff pay comes up.
Again, you've just come to that conclusion yourself. The fact that I criticise the railway's current disproportionate way of dealing with such issues doesn't mean I condone, or am relaxed about, fare evasion or irregularities.
Either way we are talking about a small, and generally quite stable, percentage of revenue being lost; typically something in the region of 2-5%. That is a completely different matter to revenue being down by 10-15% in cash terms compared to pre-Covid, or 25-30% in real terms (let alone what it was forecasted to increase to) - whilst costs are up 10+%. It's apples and oranges.
With respect I would suggest they know how to do their jobs better than you.
Whilst I'm sure they know how to issue Penalty Fares and the like (though not always correctly, one should add!), that is a different question to whether they
should be doing so.
In any case, how you know that doesn’t already happen sometimes? They will likely exercise discretion in each case.
That's certainly not been my experience, from countless conversations I've overheard at the revenue blocks. There should in any event be no need to exercise discretion here; it should be a formal policy that passenger producing an otherwise valid Oyster/contactless card at Stansted will not be penalised.
Indeed, it used to be the case that Penalty Fares didn't apply to Stansted; this policy, which recognised the fact that it was a station that many foreign passengers used, was silently scrapped some years back. Penalty Fares schemes were always intended to have exclusions for situations such as this, but GA got greedy and realised they could make more money by penalising unwitting tourists, and the situation has stuck since.
Ultimately it’s the responsibility of passengers to use a valid ticket payment method. That includes foreign tourists and whenever I go abroad I make it my business to check out the local arrangements.
That's the legal position, but as I'm sure you're well aware, that doesn't necessarily reflect what people do. Would you consider it fair game to be issued with a PF of £100 equivalent if you didn't realise a ticket had to be composted, for instance?
I don’t think this is a safe statement. A significant number of Stansted passengers will be residents of London and the south east who will be very familiar with oyster/contactless.
They may be familiar with the concept of using it, but that does not guarantee they will be familiar with completing journeys manually. If you asked 100 PAYG users, I bet 95 of them would struggle to do it.
Foreign tourists arriving into the airport will be unlikely to assume they can tap in and will naturally purchase return tickets.
There is no guarantee that they will necessarily purchase return tickets. On most other railways across the world, single leg pricing means that you just buy singles when you travel.
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