Trains are unreliable and fares are a rip-off, but nationalisation isn’t the silver bullet everyone thinks

The average motorist believes two things about rail travel in the UK, writes Simon Calder: that trains are unreliable, and that fares are too high

To turn things around, more capacity is desperately needed (Simon Calder)

How wrong can you be about the railways? In Rishi Sunak’s case, comprehensively. The helicopter-loving former prime minister got every major decision wrong, starting even before he took over at No 10 from intercontinental-private-jet-loving Liz Truss in 2022.

As chancellor, he had the power to move passengers from air to rail by increasing air passenger duty on domestic flights for which there was a realistic train-based alternative. Instead, he halved the tax, triggering a surge in the amount of flying – particularly between London and Edinburgh.

Once installed as prime minister, Sunak could have seized the moment to reform rail fares. At that time, passenger numbers were way below pre-pandemic levels. Introducing simpler pricing would not have pleased everyone; some rail travellers would be faced with higher fares than they currently pay. But that number would be relatively low, and making the ticket-buying process more transparent would have attracted new customers. Instead, Sunak decided to leave the whole anomalous system to continue to rot.

The prime minister could have encouraged his transport ministers to settle with the train drivers’ union, Aslef, well before the dispute became the longest and most bitter in railway history and drove many passengers away permanently. Instead, Sunak chose to portray two years of sporadic walkouts as “Labour’s strikes”.

Worst of all was to overturn 15 years of cross-party agreement that High Speed 2 was desperately needed, most crucially between Birmingham and northwest England. The prime minister hoped to earn some short-term political capital by scrapping HS2 north of Birmingham. His futile bid for votes scuppered hope for desperately needed rail capacity.

An entire array of open goals, then, for the self-styled “Passenger-in-Chief” – the transport secretary, Louise Haigh.

“Rail reform is at the heart of this King’s Speech,” she said. “As Passenger-in-Chief, I said we’d move fast and fix things, and that’s exactly what we’re doing with this weighty, radical legislative agenda.

“Our transport system is broken, but today’s bill will pave the way for better trains that work for everyone, no matter where you live. After years of inefficiency, we’re two weeks in and the first steps towards rail reform are being taken today. Change starts now.”

How much of a tonic for passengers on Northern Trains will her confidence prove to be?

Prospective travellers this weekend are warned: “Short-notice cancellations are expected in the North West on Sunday 21 July 2024. Plan ahead and check journeys before travelling, particularly last trains of the day, which may be earlier than usual and may be cancelled at short notice.”

Sounds lousy. Is this what Haigh had in mind when she said that “the privatisation model is failing passengers day-in, day-out”?

No, because Northern is one of four train operators already in public ownership. Being controlled by the Department for Transport (DfT) has made precious little difference for passengers in northwest England, who, Sunday after Sunday, find they cannot expect a decent service. Northern is failing passengers day-in, day-out.

Renationalisation is being touted as a silver bullet that will solve all the ills of the railways and produce, in the words of the transport secretary, “a more efficient, higher quality and reliable service”. But the fact that the DfT outsources many operations to rail firms such as Avanti West Coast, Great Western Railway and Greater Anglia in return for 2 per cent of the value of the contract is largely a sideshow.

Many passengers in northwest England were served with a Do Not Travel notice last Sunday. They may get the same treatment this weekend. The reason: successive governments have failed to deal with the nonsense that, for rail workers at Northern who are based on the eastern side of the Pennines, Sunday is part of the working week, but for those on the western side, it is not.

It is entirely up to the staff member to choose whether or not to work overtime. This is just one of a vast number of anomalies whereby the rosters depend, for example, on the year that the member of staff joined. To align workers’ contracts with the needs of the 21st-century passenger, the new government will need to invest months in negotiating with the unions – and spend many millions of pounds on buying them off.

On the subject of rail unions, I predict a rapid settlement to the current train drivers’ dispute, by way of the removal of the strings the last government attached to any pay rise for members of Aslef. But by definition, that will not address the fundamental problem, which is that the railway is kept afloat only by taxpayers pumping in £240 every second.

I have had many meetings over the past two years with the leaders of Aslef and the largest rail union, the RMT. They have proved extremely effective at surrendering hard-won employment conditions in return for additions to basic pay that are underwritten by long-suffering taxpayers who never go near a train.

Good luck in those talks. Booking office closures, too, may be on the agenda: in Germany, passengers on the Black Forest railway can talk to a ticket vendor many miles away via a video link and be confident that they are buying the appropriate ticket for their trip. To reduce the unsustainable £7.5bn annual subsidy, costs must be cut aggressively. Revenue must rise, too. Which takes us on to ticketing.

The only way that the railway can flourish is by attracting people out of their cars. But the average motorist believes two things about rail travel in the UK: that trains are unreliable, and that fares are a rip-off. Anyone who has had the misfortune to buy a “walk-up” ticket from Bristol to London has, indeed, been taken for a mug. At peak time, the price is £121.50.

Only a fool would pay such a sum, since the “Didcot dodge” offers an immediate 30 per cent saving: buy one ticket from Bristol Temple Meads to Didcot Parkway and a second from there to London Paddington, and board a train that pauses at the junction in leafy Oxfordshire.

I have lost count of the number of transport secretaries and rail ministers who have vowed to eliminate the accrued sorcery of Britain’s rail fare “structure”. The problem: many fares (such as that Bristol-to-London ticket) are too high. But to maintain revenue, others may need to rise: is £2.60 an appropriate fare for a fast eight-mile journey from Birmingham New Street to the airport?

I hope that Haigh and her rail minister, Peter Hendy, will have the courage to take the inevitable flak that will come from raising some fares while cutting others.

After a lifetime of travelling by train, I can recognise a railway that is rotting away. The measures proposed so far are all about treating the symptoms. To turn things around, more capacity is desperately needed.

Sunak’s act of national vandalism in scrapping HS2 north of Birmingham has to be reversed. There must be new, high-speed capacity for passenger services, even if it is a cheaper, “de-rated” line with trains running at 140mph rather than 225mph. The King’s Speech did not rule out such a possibility. Were Labour to resuscitate the corpse left by the previous occupant of No 10, future generations as well as present-day travellers would be thankful.