PASSENGERS will be aghast at plans to cut the ticket office opening hours at Tube stations at a time when the cost of using London Underground is going up.

Although the introduction of Oyster cards has meant the vast majority of commuters and casual travellers pass straight through the barriers nowadays, people do like the confidence they get from having a ticket office as a back up.

People approach windows just not to buy tickets but to ask questions and seek advice about routes, disruptions and accessibility issues. Without that, passengers may be forced to wander around the platform looking for for assistance.

The unions do have a point that manned ticket offices provide greater surveillance and act as a deterrent to criminals at stations, with employees able to intervene when a crime takes place in the way the Tube's ever-expanding CCTV camera network cannot.

And, of course, if the opening hours of ticket offices are reduced, fewer people will use them - and so the usage figure will eventually show demand decreasing and thereby justify the original reduction: a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A final worry is that if ticket office staff are redeployed on to the concourse, as Transport for London suggests, stations may be 'overstaffed' and those workers may be more susceptible to job cuts in the future, leaving travellers with no one to speak to at all.