It’s time to deliver a modern, fit-for-purpose fares system

Travel by train any day of the week and the chances are most people will be glued to a smartphone. Yet few if any rail customers know that the rule book underpinning what fares they can buy dates back to when fewer than one in five people owned a mobile phone.

Clearly, these well-intentioned but ultimately frustrating regulations have failed to keep pace with technology or how people work and travel today.

This is why the public and private sectors in rail are working in partnership to grasp the nettle and call for the fares system to be dismantled and re-engineered. We want to make it fairer and simpler for customers, and we’re launching a public consultation to do just that.

The 1995 Ticketing and Settlement Agreement spells out how fares should be set and sold. It assumes customers will buy their ticket at a ticket office and sets out in detail how customers must be able to buy a ticket from each of the 2,500 stations in Britain to every other station in the country.

These regulations were based on the fares structure inherited from British Rail. Since 1995, further layers have been added through requirements in franchise agreements, which assume this underlying structure. As a result, long-standing anomalies are becoming bigger problems for our customers today, impacting on businesses and the communities served by rail.

We have already taken steps to improve things where we can. On top of running more services, operators have delivered innovations such as advance tickets, special offers and mobile ticketing. We have also been delivering a fares action plan to improve the buying experience for customers, and continued the roll-out of smart ticketing.

But this is just the start. We want to work with the country to create a clear plan for reform so that we can make the right changes for the long term. There are some key principles, which include being transparent, predictable, fair, trusted, easier to use and value for money for customers; offering integration with other modes of transport; and offering personalised, flexible fares which best serve customers in different markets.

We will be launching a public consultation with Transport Focus, the independent watchdog, in June, running through the summer. This will help the industry to inform government about potential changes in fares regulation and implement improvements. Unpicking the regulation of a £10billion-a-year fares system won’t be easy, and there are no straightforward solutions. It will require partnership working between governments and the industry. But our customers and the economy deserve better. It’s time to deliver the modern, fit-for-purpose fares system Britain needs.