Paul Corfield wrote

I note also that the DfT penalise Southern if they do not provide
staffing 95% of the time to keep gates in service. I wonder how they
enforce that bit of the franchise agreement?

Maybe the gate phones home on every change of state or uploads a
summary to the statistics database every day and Southern is required
to pass them on to the DfT ?

More to the point, 95% of what time? I assume Southern has lots of
stations where no trains stops between 1am and 4am, which are closed on
Sundays, with entrances that are not open all the hours that the
station is open etc. I have previously noted that the instructions with
some /Help/ terminals (with CCTV) appear to envisage their being used
to keep gates "supervised" so that a station need not be have a member
of staff on duty adjacent to each gateline.

--
Mike D