Great Western Coffee Shop

Just had Slough and Royal Borugh Midweek (freebie) drop through door.

Headline,

"It's not Fare"

"Mum's fury as teen left stranded, saying rail staff refused to let her pay for ticket with change"

Staff at Slough allegely refused to accept change for a ^1.90 fare to Windsor. Admittedly 60ps worth of copper plus silver.

Girl had to phone a friend and wait around Slough Station to be picked up.

Mum is quoted further down:

"Since then I have been in touch with Customer Services but they don't seem intersted either."

Apparently FGW have offered a bunch of flowers to girl.

FGW spokesman said "we are investingating the situation and will respond to the customer as soon as possible." Which is rather limp as it was made two weeks after the incident.

What ever the right and wrongs it doesn't make FGW look too good. Surely FGW should have learnt by now to get onto this sort of thing straight away,  before it hits the front page.

As the girl was only 16 don't FGW staff have a duty of care under Child Protection Legislation?

As an aside what would have happened if you tried to feed 60p in pennies into a ticket machine?

Isn't 16 old enough to get married? So hardly a child needing protection.

Maybe you can get married but I thought Child Protection applied to 18.

If the same happened in a shop would you go to the papers over it. Ridiculous. 16 is old enough to be prepared to look after yourself and if carrying round loads of copper is sensible...

Why didn't she go to a shop to exchange the money?

And I don't think FGW should be responsible either. 16 is old enough.

FGW do not have a duty of care under child protection, as they were unlikely to have put her at risk as she could wait in the safety of the station ticket hall.  Any vendor can refuse your custom, go try and pay for a new car with pound coins.

Although I think it was an unreasonable act by the FGW staff member which I suspect they did not to a) want to carry all that shrapnel around, b) and have to count it at the end of the shift or both.

FGW still have some very surly characters working for them, I notice today a member of FGW staff at a station barrier line trying to talk to a member of the public while still having a scarf wrapped around his mouth bad manor I call that

Also remember that in this country, a shop or business is only obliged to accept payment that is legal tender. That is 20p and 50p pieces in amounts up to ^10; 5p and 10p pieces in amounts up to ^5; and 1p and 2p pieces in amounts up to 20p.

If this young adult presented 60p in bronze then the staff member was perfectly entitled to refuse it as it was not legal tender. She was not put at risk as there was a safe place for her to wait.

Having worked on public transport, it was very common for people to hand over handfuls of small value coins to try and get away without paying the proper fare - staff who accept it rarely count every coin but have to make up any shortfall from their own pocket.

Why would anyone carry around that much small change in their pockets!!!

On board staff are forced to accept this when tendered for ticket puchases on branch lines. I tend to think they offer it on purpose as the poor conductor has'nt got time to check it and cant refuse it either!

From first hand experience, I know how frustrating a pocketful of coppers can be when offered as payment.  However:-

Whether or not coins, (or Scots banknotes for that matter), have legal tender status, their acceptability as a means of payment is essentially a matter for agreement between the parties involved. Legal tender has a very narrow technical meaning in relation to the settlement of 'debt'. Strictly speaking, the 'debtor' must pay the exact amount owed, change cannot therefore be demanded.  In this context therefore the term ^legal tender^ has very little practical application.

You are right.  "legal tender" is only a concept that applies to settlement of a debt.  If you are paying at a station or shop you do not have a debt to settle.  The ticket office or shopkeeper isn't obliged to sell you anything and can quite legally refuse as a matter of contract law.  However, refusal might breach other laws for example refusing to sell tickets to black lesbian wheelchair users whould be illegal discrimination inteh provsion of goods or services; and there might be something in the franchise agreement stating that the ticket office is obliged to sell all available tickets to anyone.

I suspect that it all comes down to what is reasonable.  The problem with commenting on things like this is you never have all the facts.  If the tendering was not malitious and hadn't happened before then I suspect that the staff member has being unreasonable.  But why didn't she try the next window or a ticket machine? 

At a municipal pay-and-display car park in Plymouth, I found that a whole day's parking was ^4.90. The machine says "no change given", so most of the time that's effectively ^5. But the nice thing about this machine was that it also had a sign saying "maximum of 30 coins accepted per transaction" - so I assume that someone had decided to annoy it by paying with 49 x 10p.

For complicated reasons, we sampled 3 different car parks that day, and the best one in terms of payment was the FGW one at the station - which doesn't say much about Plymouth City Council's car parking department.

As she was 16, she would have to pay adult fare.

^2 adult fare so presume it was ^1.90 before fare change.