Now it used to be said that you could not have it both ways - unless of course you are a private railway company. When it's convenient for the Rail Companies, they compare their annual price rises with predicted inflation, whereas a year ago, when inflation was on its way down, they compared their price rises with the previous year's inflation.
In reality what they should be doing, is comparing their price rises with last July's inflation which was minus 1.4%. This is about blatantly lining the rail company’s pockets at tax payers and rail passenger’s expense. On average UK train fares are already some 20% higher than the European average and if the UK Government is serious about reducing road congestion then it needs to urgently review the way that rail fares are regulated.
The Association of Train Operating Companies (AToC) faced criticism in early 2009 for failing to itemize each train company's average unregulated fares rise. However, some companies revealed their fare increases; Virgin Trains increased unregulated fares by an average of 2.8%, ScotRail's fares rose by 3%, and turn-up-and-go fares on Southern trains rose by 4% and the Southeastern train company’s unregulated fares rose by 7.3% and other fares rose by 2.8%. A number of companies, including National Express East Anglia, First Capital Connect, TransPennine Express and Merseyrail have frozen their unregulated fares.
As tax payers it is worth remembering that the private rail companies are receiving approximately some £ 5billion per year from the taxpayers, so there can be little justification for rail companies having the right to increase rail fares every year by inflation plus.
The real question is why rail passengers should have to pay higher fares regardless of the quality of service they receive, with UK rail passengers currently facing fares that are twenty percent higher than those paid by our European neighbours.
It’s time to face facts, to most people it is pretty clear that the privatised rail experiment has failed, it’s time to re-unify our rail service and to bring the rail services back under responsible public ownership where service and efficiency comes before profit at passengers expense.
There is a huge contradiction in the finances of all the Train Operating Companies. Most have had fare increases, and all have reported increasing passenger numbers. However, all have reported falls in revenue, most putting this down to the recession, in a bid to increase taxpayer funding from the franchise. Forgive me for being stupid, but if you have more customers and charge higher prices, surely, your revenue should go up, not down. It appears that Train Operating Companies are using some kind of sophisticated accounting method to justify increased taxpayer subsidy. What is evident is that the payments made to shareholders has not suffered.
ReplyDeleteFair point - there is another aspect of the running of our railways thats quite disturbing, and thats the culture of rewarding failure - which seems to have really come to the fore under New Labour, where rail bosses were still collecting bonuses for failure - the case of the Network Rail engineering overuns in 2008 springs readily to mind.
ReplyDeleteAlso the nature of the relationship between Government (reguardless of party) and the reilway companies needs to be questioned, as Government recieves significant financial contributions from the rail companies for their franchises so naturally does not want to get into the business of discussing the questionable relationship that exists between the private railway companies and the government.