The ghost of British Rail looms over Labour's plans. But it could be exorcised

Telegraph

8 hours ago

Rail ticket increases are usually calculated by adding one percentage point to July's inflation reading on the Retail Price Index (RPI), which came in 0.2 points above forecasts on Wednesday at 4.8 per cent. Ministers will now have to confirm that fares for 2026 will copy last year's pattern when they rose by one point above the RPI reading from July 2024.
This comes days before train guards plan to strike over the August bank holiday weekend. Unions have decided that scanning e-tickets is a different requirement to the physical checking of traditional paper tickets. The strike will cause huge disruption over one of the busiest weekends of the year on CrossCountry services which link the south west with the Midlands and North.
Britain's railways are at a watershed. Under privatisation passenger journeys almost doubled. By the 2010s, private franchises were running three times as many trains between London and Manchester as the old British Rail (BR) had in the early 1990s. Throughout the two decades between privatisation in the early 1990s and the pandemic, passenger journeys increased by 107 per cent and services increased by 32 per cent. During this period, passenger satisfaction in Britain was higher than any other major European railway. Revenue increased by 145 per cent in real terms, compared with only a 16 per cent rise in operating costs, and £14bn of private investment was put into improving the train fleet.
Privatisation also introduced innovations in marketing, ticketing and operational efficiency. The volume of rail travel in Britain rose to a level not seen since the 1930s, on a network half the size and with a very good safety record.
The pandemic was devastating for rail. It wasn't just that train travel collapsed during the lockdowns, requiring subsidies of £20.5bn (in 2023/4 prices) to cover losses but that people's travel and working behaviour changed, probably forever. Traditional flows of revenue from business travel, first class and five-day commuter season tickets, particularly in London and the South East have fallen away. In the year to March just 13 per cent of journeys were made using season tickets, compared with 34 per cent before the pandemic. Even though passenger numbers are close to 100 per cent of pre-Covid levels, revenue is still down by £1.4bn and stands at just 89.1 per cent with a low yield. Passengers are paying less to travel outside the old peaks. The taxpayer continues to cover an unacceptably high annual subsidy of £12bn for a sector which only delivers 2 per cent of all journeys taken by the public.