§ MR. LOUGH (Islington, N.)I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade whether, his attention has been drawn to a letter written by the general manager of the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway Company, in which it is stated that cheap tickets for workmen are not intended to be issued to workmen who are not in constant daily employment; whether he has noticed a case in which a cheap ticket has been refused to a working woman who comes regularly once a week to work in London; and whether, by legislation or otherwise, he can take steps to prevent such limitation of the benefit of the Cheap Trains Act.
§ THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF TRADE (Mr. RITCHIE,) CroydonI have been in communication with the managing committee of the South-Eastern and Chatham and Dover Railways and have received a reply to the following effect:—The managing committee found that a large number of persons who were not working men or women within any possible construction of the Act were obtaining "workmen's tickets," and it therefore became necessary to issue special instructions to the committee's servants with a view to stopping the practice. Unfortunately a mistake was made with regard to the particular case to which the hon. Member's question refers, and since the facts have been made known to the managing committee, orders have been given that a workman's ticket shall be issued in future. It would appear, therefore, that the occurrence referred to was an accidental one, and that there is no intention on the part of the companies mentioned to limit in any way the operations of the Cheap Trains Act or of the provisions respecting workmen's tickets contained in the recent Amalgamation Act; as evidence of this the company informs me that during the past year more than a million and a quarter workmen's tickets were issued in excess of the number for the previous twelve months.