Bringing our priorities on fares & ticketing together

Railfuture issues Press Releases, Social Media posts and articles on fares and tickets regularly. This article has been prepared to give some context to each of them and to bring together all the areas we would like to see change and improvements as a ‘single whole’.

The railway needs to attract more passengers. That means the fares the traveller sees are simple to understand and offer fair value for money. A key challenge is the range in price for a journey – eg London to Leeds single varies from £19.80 to £122.60; the sheer complexity of navigating the process to get the right fare for the journey you are about to undertake – and being satisfied it is a reasonable price – is a real disincentive to travel. For instance, there could be a need to search out independent websites to look for Split fare opportunities.

Fares must be reset to deliver clarity and encourage more travel by offering more better value for money fares, removing the anomalies which lead to split-ticketing (or offering them seamlessly by default) and tackling the myriad and complex range of fares (eg 665 types of off-peak restriction is a recipe for confusion). This will encourage more people to choose the train (and for existing users to be more frequent travellers); More travellers can easily offset any small reductions in fare and the disappearance of the very worst value (ie most expensive) fares.

The Ticketing process must be made much more user friendly to encourage self-service – and Ticket Office staff relocated to the platform with a wider remit to help passengers generally – and still sell tickets when needed.

Much more travel on the railway is now optional - for leisure, for business (where Zoom and Microsoft Teams are the new competitors) and many commuters now have a lot of choice over how many days a week they attend the workplace (although we mustn’t forget that for noticeable numbers, workplace attendance is still expected every day).

So, where are our focus areas?

1. Campaigning for a fair inflation fare increase each year. In particular we want to see CPI, not RPI, used as the basis and we want to see rail passengers treated consistently with car drivers and air passengers.
2. The simplification of fares. In particular:
   1. Formalising the existence of split tickets to stop hiding cheap and legitimate fare choices.
   2. Delivering more Pay as You Go fare payment coverage (with a but: PAYG should never be the only option).
3. A continued ability to buy tickets from people, not just a machine or online. That doesn’t mean we favour the wholescale retention of ticket offices – unless a ticket office staff member is busy, we think they are better used by being out on the platform helping in other ways (and still retaining the ability to sell tickets).
4. Improvements to the way online and TVM ticket sales are made to make the buying process more intuitive – and to make all types of ticket available.
5. The retention of simple, user friendly tickets such as the London Travelcard National Rail Add on. Whilst we definitely like PAYG as an option for travellers, we don’t see it as a reason to remove simplicity and certainty from the choice of tickets an intending traveller has.
6. On low carbon travel and decarbonisation, we campaign for the benefits of carbon efficient rail travel and the need to encourage travellers to use it, and thus we see the need for rail fares to be competitively priced and the benefits to society overall of lower priced travel.

Here’s the latest on topics in this area:


 

• We are campaigning for it to continue to be very widely possible to buy a ticket from a member of staff – that doesn’t have to be (indeed often shouldn’t be) with the glass of a ticket office window between passenger and member of staff.  We have responded to the expected Government driven consultation to emphasise the importance of rail staff being available to sell tickets and give advice.
• We responded to the TfL consultation on Travelcard abolition to set our case for their retention.
• We were pleased that the 2023 rail fare increases were in line with earnings increases, not inflation, so announced as 5.9% - but thought this was rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. The service offered to passengers simply isn’t value for money, even when there isn’t industrial action. Too many cancellations, a focus on cost, not the bottom line, so ignoring that most of the railways’ funding comes from passengers and that the service offered needs to meet their needs if revenue is to grow
• We campaigned without success for the 2022 Inflationary Fare rise to be skipped for the year - we believed this to be consistent, and fair to the railway as Vehicle Fuel Duty had been frozen, and domestic Air Passenger Duty is to be reduced by 50% from 2023. We hoped that this would make up for the March 2021 fare rises being inflation busting - both continuing to use RPI (rather than CPI) and adding an extra 1% to the rise.
• We are campaigning for a speed up in the glacial pace of fares reform and have set out some simple ideas for early improvement and highlighted that much could be achieved by putting a much more intuitive wrapper round the current fares design and presented travellers with their ticket choices in a much better way.
• We have been disappointed with ticket changes for the intermittent workplace attender. We believe the move away from 5 day commuting is now 'embedded' for many types of work. Flexible, clearly explained, smart ticket options which support this trend without encouraging a Tuesday – Thursday peak are essential - The flexi-seasons announced in June 2021 are a step in the right direction, but perhaps not quite flexi enough.