Ticket torture

Yesterday’s announcement that rail fares are to be hiked by up to 3.6 per cent, leaving some commuters with annual bills hovering unpleasantly close to £10,000, is straightforwardly appalling. The London-swindon railcard will now cost £9,448, almost half the average post-tax earnings of the town’s residents.

Yet in another respect, the rail fare rises reveal a more complex picture of inter-connected failures. The British economy is far less productive than we would wish, so workers tend to flock to London. This is because, as the Chancellor claimed last year, “the productivity gap between our capital and our second, third and fourth cities is greater than in any other major economy in the world”. But the influx of labour attached to this productivity problem only serves to reveal another failing – the unforgivable lack of affordable housing in the capital. As a result, workers are forced to travel longer and longer, from homes further and further away from their offices. And then they are penalised for doing so with rail tickets whose prices have risen 40 per cent in the past decade, even as wages have stagnated.

Pity, then, the poor commuter. He or she is the victim of a chain of deficiencies, each one more intractable than the last. But that does not mean the Government should not try. On the railways, as Tony Lodge suggests on this page, increased competition must be introduced to improve service and lower ticket prices. On housing, it is time to build more. On productivity, post-brexit deregulation, decentralisation and tax incentives must help rebalance the economy. It’s only a rail ticket. Yet it says a lot about what’s wrong with Britain.