vallierojas: Rail users aren't rich. They can't take these fare rises

We are evolving towards a �10,000 season ticket for some commuters. Passengers are bearing the brunt of privatisation

Reading about the riots as they affected London, I kept thinking of my historical railway atlas. Tottenham ? that was built up after the coming of the Great Northern Railway. Croydon ? the London Brighton & South Coast. Ealing ? the Metropolitan District Railway. London is a city of commuters; it was made by the railways, who were allowed by governments to build their lines in return for a commitment to supply a certain number of cheap trains for working people. Today, the government is more concerned to ensure the provision of expensive fares ? or, as George Osborne put it during the comprehensive spending review of last October, "RPI plus 3%", an advance of 2% on the previous formula.

Fares rises come in from January, the anticipation of them nicely timed to spoil the festive season. The measure of RPI used as a benchmark is the one from the proceeding July, and the figure was revealed today as 5%, meaning 8% increases next year. Average increases of 8%, that is. A 5% leeway means some fares will rise by 13%.

A good bit of news to announce in high summer, with many commuters abroad, enjoying a short respite from their overcrowded trains. "This is really big," says Stephen Joseph, on the Campaign for Better Transport. "We've already got rail fares that are 20% above the European average, and now we've got an 8% average increase for three years. That's never happened before."

According to the government, commuters can take it. Rail users are characterised as prosperous; but all travellers are prosperous except bus users, and it's not as if the government isn't cutting bus services.

"Look at the people coming off the trains at Leeds at eight in the morning," says the rail analyst Paul Salveson. "They're not rich." Look at the passengers coming through the arrivals desk at Heathrow, on the other hand, and they generally are rich ? And there would seem something bizarre about a transport policy that allows domestic air fares to cost half as much as train fares, even if aeroplanes didn't cause 10 times more carbon emissions. (We are also assured that it's all right to treat rail users badly since there aren't many of them. Only 7% of journeys made are by train, we are told. But that statistic includes the taking of buses around the corner.)

The government argues that fare increases are necessary to pay for heavy investment ? and, yes, there has been a renewal of electrification programmes; hundreds of new carriages are in the pipeline; we're to get Crossrail and maybe even High Speed 2, going from London to Birmingham and beyond. But the argument for the last two projects is that they will be economically beneficial. So why should the users of the most benign transport mode pay disproportionately?

The function of railways is to compensate for the barbarities of cars and planes, and so you have to take a wider view of them, especially if you're committed ? as the present government is ? to reducing carbon emissions by 80%.

According to John Stewart of Hacan Clearskies, the campaign against aircraft noise: "They seem to think they can do it all by bringing in electric cars. There's no talk any more about modal shift, getting people off the roads out of the aeroplanes, but it's just as necessary as ever." And the prosperity of our cities depends on people coming into them. "Touch the riches of London," as an Underground ad for travel to the West End used to say, under a picture of a woman examining a piece of fabric in a department store. High rail fares will stop them coming, or stop them spending in our beleaguered shops when they do come.

But we never have taken a wider view. By and large we've tried to operate our trains as cheaply as possible, hence railway privatisation ? which has made them five times more expensive to operate than in the days of British Rail. The problem is fragmentation. For instance, every minute of delay triggers a paper trail as the train operator seeks compensation from another train operating company or from Network Rail, or Network Rail seeks compensation from ? Into every crevice in the system, a lawyer has been inserted.

This fragmentation requires cost reduction, hence the McNulty report in May, with its many appetising recommendations, such as reducing numbers of station staff. The fact is that fragmentation is caused by privatisation, which was a Conservative policy. Therefore the present government does not blame privatisation as such, and so with the railways ? in contrast to the bright new dawns being declared elsewhere ? it's "evolution not revolution".

In one area, certainly, we have evolution. In the case of commutes from places like Swindon and Norwich we are evolving towards the �10,000 season ticket. According to Guy Dangerfield of Passenger Focus: "There's a lot of real frustration out there, but it rarely gets to anger." Just as well for the government, I say. Railway privatisation was supposed to deflect public resentment from the politicians when the railways went wrong. It failed in that, as it failed in much else.

Andrew Martin

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