On 25 June, I wrote to the portfolio holder for transport at Cornwall Council, Dan Rogerson, to advise him of a problem where a visitor (Mrs C) to Cornwall had used buses around the county for a week and had paid for all her journeys with her smartphone using the tap and cap system. The system should have capped her total expenditure for the week at £32 but she found that she had been charged £46 in total.
What seemed to have happened was that the Littlepay system, instead of allocating all her journeys to the one account, had set up two accounts for Mrs C, one that recorded all her journeys on Go Cornwall Bus and one for her journeys on First Bus. She is able to view the Littlepay account that recorded the Go Cornwall journeys but not the parallel account.
Nearly 4 weeks later, the officers at Cornwall Council have not been able to resolve the issue and have not refunded the excess charge to Mrs C. I asked Dan Rogerson to make sure that an officer spoke to me to see if I could help resolve the issue but that has not happened and Mr Rogerson has told me that he is too busy to get directly involved in trying to sort out the matter himself. He said, "This is one issue amongst many, many more that I have had raised with me over the last two months. I have not been dealing with it direct as I am not an officer with the technical or operational experience to do so.”
Not only has Mrs C not been refunded the money owed to her but there is the real possibility that her case is not a one-off. It is very likely that the same thing could have happened to many more passengers (hundreds perhaps). Some may not have even realised that they had been overcharged. Because of the way that charges are taken automatically from the passenger’s bank account in small amounts for each journey, it may not be immediately obvious that the total taken over a day or a week is more than what should have been the capped amount.
Whilst I have encouraged passengers to use tap and cap, my confidence in the system has been dented by this particular example and by previous examples. I am, therefore, repeating my advice to passengers, viz. if you use tap and cap, check your bank account to make sure that you have not been overcharged. In the case of Mrs C, she has told me that she will not be using tap and cap next time she visits Cornwall because she simply does not trust it.
Update
5 August 2025
For an update to this story with my question to Cornwall Council Cabinet and the response, see Cabinet question.