Students petition against new Stagecoach policy

Stagecoach has announced they will no longer be replacing any lost or damaged bus passes. A petition to get them to reconsider this new policy has reached 734 signatures as of Tuesday 30 November.

Prior to this policy, students could get their lost or stolen bus passes replaced for a fee of £25. However, this change will mean that students will have to buy another bus pass or pay for individual bus journeys.

This has come after the price of the bus pass increased to £301 earlier this term. Students across the University have taken to social media to express their dissatisfaction.

The petition’s authors, Emma Tarcy and Graham Stott, urge students to sign to “stop Stagecoach blatantly exploiting us as a captive audience of students.”

When asked what encouraged them to launch the petition, Emma and Graham told the Boar that their initial inspiration was a Facebook post which criticised the new Stagecoach policy.

They went on to say: “We are sick of being taken advantage of just because we’re students, but actually there’s enough of us who are dissatisfied with the service, so we thought let’s do something collectively which Stagecoach may actually notice.”

They both expressed how deeply ingrained these issues with buses are into the Warwick student lifestyle, highlighting a lack of proper timetable and frequent delays in bus timings as two of the main problems.

Emma commented: “In the first few hours alone the petition received loads of comments expressing the same view which is great.”

Graham added: “Ex-students are also signing it which shows the amount of dissatisfaction and the fact that this is a long-term problem.”

When contacted for a comment, Stagecoach confirmed the changes to their replacement policy for lost or stolen bus passes.

Chris Child, Stagecoach Midlands’ marketing manager, told the Boar: “Due to suspected fraudulent activity involving the passes we are not giving automatic replacements anymore and instead will consider requests on a case by case basis.”

He added: “We always advise that, as this is an item of high value, it should be insured under a household insurance policy – that way if it is lost, the cost of it should be covered by that.”

“In addition, if a student believes that their pass has been stolen, we would expect that they will report that to the police.”

He went on to say: “To help put this in context, if someone purchased a £300 item from a shop and then lost that item, they would expect to either have that covered by insurance or to buy a new one – they would not consider going back to the shop to ask for another one.”

Emma and Graham are hoping to email the petition to Stagecoach and begin sharing it on the company’s social media platforms. They also plan to appeal to the Students’ Union (SU) for help in the matter.