NASTY TRICK THAT COSTS US ALL DEAR
THe sharp jump in the cost of rail fares at a time when many are struggling to make ends meet, and there is also major disruption to the network, is an outrageous insult to the travelling public.
The increase is a nasty trick played by the Government – particularly disgraceful as it is based on an out-of-date cost-of-living index. for, in setting the highest fares increase since January 2013, the Department for Transport has used the Retail Price Index (RPI) as its measure of inflation. However, the most widely respected measure, the Consumer Price Index (CPI), records inflation at 2.6 per cent – compared with the figure of 3.6 per cent for the RPI.
This means that train travellers are being unfairly punished. for the fact is that, as the benchmark for changes to most government-controlled finances, the CPI measure has replaced the RPI over the past few years.
for decades, the RPI (which includes mortgage-interest payments) has been used for governments’ inflation target. But, introduced in 1996, the CPI came to be considered by Whitehall as a fairer yardstick.
Rail users are not the only victims of this switch. Whereas the higher RPI is used for rises in water bills, other utilities and the rate of interest charged for student loans, the lower CPI rate is used to decide how much extra is given to pensioners and welfare benefit recipients.
Rail passengers, though, have suffered a double-hit. for the train operating firms and Network Rail (which owns, operates and develops Britain’s 20,000 miles of track and devises timetables) seem utterly incapable of providing a reliable service.
How symbolic that on the very day that commuters learned ticket prices will soar, great swathes of the rail network were out of action. for example, at one of london’s busiest commuter terminals, Waterloo, services were brought to a standstill after a train from Guildford was derailed.
Already, passengers on South West trains have experienced severe disruption, cancellations and inconvenience as a result of major refurbishment at Waterloo, with Platforms 1 to 10 being closed so engineers can extend them. People travelling into the capital from Surrey have faced waits of up to an hour to board at peak times.
This comes on top of more than 16 months of misery for Southern Rail users due to industrial action over reduced manning of autonomously operating carriages. The attempt by train operators to phase out conductors has led to cancellations and huge delays on the london-Brighton route. Passengers have also been warned of a month’s disruption on Paddington-Wales route, and that no trains will run in or out of euston while a major power supply to the station is rerouted by Network Rail on behalf of HS2. elsewhere, rail services through Yeovil, Honiton and other West Country destinations have been halted by a car accident on a railway bridge.
Rail passengers are justified in feeling hard done by compared with motorists – who have benefited from the decisions by successive chancellors to freeze the level of fuel duty (which also normally rises in line with the lower-rate RPI).This policy is deeply hypocritical considering politicians want to get more people onto trains and out of polluting cars.
AND there is another factor that impinges on rail users. Rising housing costs in big cities and towns make it increasingly expensive for people to live near their urban-based offices and factories. Thus they choose to buy homes at a distance – but are then punished with high rail fares.
Then, of course, both Tory and labour politicians have allowed much of the rail network to be run by foreign firms. Welsh railways are German-owned, ScotRail and england’s east coast service is run by the Dutch firm Abellio and the french (as part of Govia) own Southern Rail.
What’s more, hard-pressed commuters are being forced to pay more at a time when they see the pay for train company bosses hitting stratospheric levels.
At Go-Ahead group, one of the shareholders in Southern Rail, the boss, David Brown, took home £1.3 million last year.
And 48 Network Rail executives are paid salaries of more than £150,000 a year – that’s more than the Prime minister.
No wonder there was so much support for Jeremy Corbyn’s election pledge that a labour government would take the railways back into public ownership.
Unless Theresa may’s government demonstrates it is on the side of the travelling public – hundreds of thousands of whom are traditional Tory voters – it may find to its cost that it will lose their support at the next election.