Train company failed to pay out £5,000 in competition because the public’s ideas weren’t good enough

A train company has been reprimanded after failing to pay out £5,000 in a competition because the public’s ideas “weren’t good enough”.

East Midlands Railway was found to have caused “unnecessary disappointment” to the more than 800 entrants who had sent in ideas on how to improve its services after the pandemic.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) dismissed the operator’s excuse that the standard of ideas had been too “poor quality” to award the prize and ruled it had breached competition standards.

The ruling comes after East Midlands Railway launched the competition on social media and its website in February this year calling on its passengers to “help us build back better”.

Promoting the competition on Twitter, the company asked for ideas to improve “passenger well-being” once Covid-19 restrictions were lifted.

East Midlands Railway later announced on its website that it had been “overwhelmed with the level of passion and interest shown” and the “huge range of ideas” sent in.

However, East Midlands Railway, which is owned by Abellio, then told customers that it felt it was “not the right thing to do” to spend money on a cash prize and implementing passengers’ ideas while the railways are being propped up by the taxpayer.

The Government took over financial control of the railways soon after the first lockdown as passenger numbers plummeted to just five per cent of pre-pandemic footfall.

The agreement suspended the operators’ franchise deals and paid them a flat fee to run their lines while the taxpayer sustained the losses from the drop-off in revenue.

Abellio, a subsidiary of the Dutch state-owned Nederlandse Spoorwegen, took over East Midland Railway in August 2019 promising to invest £600 million in the line, including in 165 new carriages.

In its submission to the ASA, East Midlands Railway said it had had to run the competition as a “contractual obligation” of its franchise contract with the Government.

The operator also said that it had decided not to pay out the cash prize as the competition had not generated any ideas that “would be suitable to be implemented”, and also because it was “starting to see the financial impact” of the pandemic.

However, the ASA pointed out that the company launched the competition a year after the pandemic first struck and should have been able to “anticipate the challenges” of going ahead with it at that point.

The authority said that East Midlands Railway did not appear to have appointed any independent judges to assess the ideas and that it could have still awarded the prize even if it didn’t think any were practicable.

The ASA judgement added: “We considered that by cancelling the competition for the reasons given and not awarding the prize, Abellio had not dealt fairly with participants and had caused unnecessary disappointment.”

East Midlands Railway was warned that it must pay out prizes for any future competitions it launches.