Protests over 3.5pc increase in rail fares
Link ticket prices to reliability
TRANSPORT: Protests will be held at Leeds rail station today amid anger over an expected 3.5 per cent increase in regulated train fares. Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union will stage demonstrations at stations in several cities.
PROTESTS WILL be held outside Leeds railway station today amid mounting anger over an expected 3.5 per cent increase in regulated train fares.
Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) will stage demonstrations outside stations in cities including London, Birmingham, Cardiff, Leeds and Edinburgh.
The union claims that rail passengers are paying “through the nose” for overcrowded services. Research published this week found that the cost of rail travel has increased at more than twice the speed of wages since 2008.
The TUC said fares have risen by 42 per cent over the past 10 years, while nominal weekly earnings have only grown by 18 per cent.
Many long-distance commuters will see the annual cost of getting to work increase by more than £150 next year. The Department for Transport (DfT) uses the July Retail Prices Index (RPI) measure of inflation to determine the cap on the annual increase in regulated train fares, which comes into force every January.
Economists predict this will be around 3.5 per cent, but the exact figure will be released by the Office for National Statistics at 9.30am today. Regulated fares include season tickets on most commuter routes, some off-peak return tickets on long-distance journeys and Anytime tickets around major cities.
The Scottish Government caps regulated off-peak fare increases at RPI minus one percentage point.
Campaigners argue it is unfair on passengers to use the RPI figure instead of the lower CPI measure of inflation.
RMT general secretary Mick Cash said: “Even if fares were pegged at the more modest CPI, these latest increases would still massively outstrip wages leaving the British passenger to pay through the nose to travel on rammed out and unreliable services.”
TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said: “Our railways need urgent investment, but private rail companies are being allowed to prioritise shareholder profits over improving services.”A DfT spokesman said: “Any fare increase is unwelcome, but it is not fair to ask people who do not use trains to pay more for those who do.
Taxpayers already subsidise the network by more than £4bn a year – meaning that 38 per cent of our transport budget is spent on the two per cent of journeys that the railway accounts for.”
THE URGENT need to reform the railways will become even more overwhelming today when it is confirmed that fares will rise by approximately 3.5 per cent in the New Year. A price hike which directly correlates with the higher rate of inflation, it will – inevitably – be yet another insult for all those rail users who continue to endure unprecedented delays and disruption across the North.
Yet, while the Government has previously maintained that such increases are a necessary price to pay if the railways are to benefit from a new era of investment and that passengers should stump up for a greater share of this financial burden, this justification is no longer sustainable when Northern is scrapping services with such frequency, especially on Sundays, and when just 22 per cent of TransPennine Express trains here reach their destination within 10 minutes of schedule.
Under-performance like this would not be tolerated in any other industry or any public service – schools and hospitals would be placed in special measures if they failed pupils and patients on this scale – and Ministers will be betraying the travelling public if today’s announcement is not accompanied by a range of new measures to improve punctuality and reliability.
The Yorkshire Post has previously argued that all new franchises need to include a number of strict conditions on customer service, including simpler rules governing the swift payment of compensation to passengers when trains are late. But, given that the troubled Northern and TransPennine Express franchises both still have many years to run, Ministers need to go much further and index-link future increases to performance.
Rather than prolonging the current funding mechanism which is effectively a reward for failure because there is an insufficient incentive to improve services, or introduce modern rolling stock on local lines here, the onus would be firmly on operators to earn the right to increase fares by inflation so passengers are no longer taken for a ride. Even Transport Secretary Chris Grayling can’t say no to this, can he?