Rail passengers are justified in feeling they’ve been taken for a ride with the announcement that prices for most journeys will rise by 1.6% in January.
The increase applies to all regulated fares in England and Wales, and most in Scotland, and it includes season tickets, anytime urban tickets and most off-peak long-distance returns.
Two points occur to me:
:: Why is the formula so rigid in being linked to the Retail Prices Index figure for July?
:: Why do the rises always take place in January at a time when traditionally people are short of money after Christmas?
Train usage down
And this year there is the added factor of Covid. The planned increase does not take into the dramatic drop in passenger numbers as a result of the pandemic. The latest figures from the Department for Transport suggest nationally train usage is only 25% of the number of passengers that would normally be expected at this time of year.
Ministers at first urged everyone to stay at home and avoid public transport unless necessary. While that message was reinforced and rammed home, what has been less obvious is the encouragement to use public transport again. It is a safe and efficient way to move people around.
Better communication
A Cabinet minister acknowledged yesterday at a business audience that the Government needed to do more to communicate to people to use public transport again for leisure purposes.
Retail price inflation tends to be higher than the consumer price measure because it takes account of housing costs. The Royal Statistical Society argues that CPI is a more accurate measure than RPI. And the UK Statistics Authority argued that publishing RPI should be stopped at some point in the future.
Yet the rail price increases are still set according to July’s RPI figure.
Wouldn’t it be better to take an average of consumer price inflation over the year as a more accurate way of determining price increases? And why not bring in the price rises at the start of June to run for 12 months rather than the beginning of the year when people are travelling in the cold and dark? It’s almost as if everyone is actively seeking bad headlines.
Enticing passengers
Transport Focus has called for a “Head Out to Help Out” campaign to encourage passengers back on to the trains.
That’s a start but it also needs a concerted push to persuade people to get out of their cars and on to trains. Rail travel had been on an upward trend reaching record levels. Department for Transport figures showed that in 2019 more rail journeys were made in Great Britain than any other European country except for Germany.
Surely now is the time to continue on that journey rather than have rail travel hit the buffers.
:: As for the blog post headline, it refers to the locomotive on the miniature railway at Hotham Park in Bognor Regis!