This week’s announcement on flexi-tickets for rail travel falls short of what is required. We must continue to press for reform

 
The key test is whether what has been put in place will encourage more people back onto the train

 
We’ve all been waiting on the platform for ages – years in fact – for the arrival of flexi-tickets. They finally trundled into the station this week, much delayed but at least not cancelled.

I was reminded by a journalist on The Independent that as rail minister, I had in fact announced a pilot trial scheme of flexi-tickets back in 2013. That seems to have been shunted into the sidings after I moved from the Department for Transport to the Home Office shortly afterwards. Certainly I heard no more of it.

The impetus for this had been the London Olympics the year before. In order to ensure that public transport was not overwhelmed, people were encouraged to work at home during the games. It all worked rather well and businesses began to realise that their employees did not have to be physically in some central location in order to carry out their job.

So work patterns were changing long before Covid, though the pandemic has greatly accelerated that trend. Yet the present fares and ticketing structure is still based on the 1995 Ticketing Settlement Agreement, itself largely based on a British Rail system before that. Since 1995, franchise agreements have added layer after layer of complexity and restriction, so that we now have over 55 million individual fares available, almost one per person in the country.

This creaky structure is a real disincentive to train travel. First, finding the best fare for any particular journey can be like trying to solve a clue in a cryptic crossword puzzle – you have to understand the code and have the right mindset to work out the answer. A 2016 survey of potential passengers revealed that 35%, one in three, said they were put off using trains because of the complexity of fares. In particular, people suspect, with some justification, that ticket machines will not automatically offer them the best price for the journey they want to make.

Second, the inflexibility of the structure means the industry has not been able to respond as it has wanted to changing travel patterns. The system assumes that people are still commuting to work Monday to Friday, with morning and evening peaks in travelling, and that Sundays are days when travel is very light.

The reality post-Covid is that a mixture of home and office working is very likely to be the future pattern for many, with journeys spread more evenly throughout the day

The reality post-Covid is that a mixture of home and office working is very likely to be the future pattern for many, with journeys spread more evenly throughout the day. Mondays and Fridays are likely to be less busy than midweek days, and as leisure travel picks up, Saturdays and Sundays are likely to be much busier. Indeed, last Sunday was the busiest day of the previous seven days on the London Underground in terms of passenger numbers.

The government’s flexi-ticket offer addresses virtually none of this. There is nothing to introduce single-leg pricing, nothing to rationalise split ticketing, and nothing to deal with the 09.30 cliff edge which, before Covid at least, would often see the rush-hour train just before this edge running with oodles of spare capacity, and the first off-peak train afterwards heaving with passengers. This is not a sensible use of rolling stock.

In short, Britain’s railways, Great or otherwise, desperately need a root and branch overhaul of fares and ticketing arrangements. Instead, we have been given a twig and leaf one.

So what does this week’s announcement offer? The so-called flexi-seasons, offering as they do eight return journeys within a 28 day period, are in fact more accurately termed a carnet of eight tickets. Unlike with season tickets, there can be no bonus weekend trips.

The official Department for Transport release compares the cost of two of the eight carnet tickets against two peak day returns per week. This measurement indeed shows useful savings on many routes (though on a few, such as Maidenhead to Paddington, the new ticket option is actually more expensive). But this is an artificial comparison. The reality is very few people buy two peak day returns each week. They will either buy a weekly season, to travel three or more days that week. Or they will travel off-peak and so save loads of money. Or they will buy a peak one way single and get a cheap advance ticket back.

The fairer comparison is with existing season tickets and here the savings can be rather less impressive. For the journey from Eastbourne to London for example, the DfT figure shows a reduction over the year from £7,072 for the twice weekly peak returns to £4,763 with the new carnet option. But the annual season ticket for that journey costs £5,168, releasing a much smaller saving. Logically, the new carnet, if it to mimic the season ticket (and even discounting weekend travel) should cost two-fifths, 40%, of the price of the annual season, which would come to £2,067. Even if the comparison were with a monthly or weekly season, the price would be a great deal less than £4,763.

With a car-based recovery under way, with traffic levels now in excess of where they were pre-pandemic, and public transport use languishing somewhere between 40 and 65% of pre-Covid levels, depending on the mode, this was a time to be bold. The scheme advanced is not that

I don’t wish to sound churlish. It is good that the government has crossed the line into flexi territory, and there are generally savings to be had, albeit much more modest than the government release implies. But the key test is whether what has been put in place will encourage more people back onto the train, or to try it in the first place. Sadly, except at the margins, it is unlikely it will. With a car-based recovery under way, with traffic levels now in excess of where they were pre-pandemic, and public transport use languishing somewhere between 40 and 65% of pre-Covid levels, depending on the mode, this was a time to be bold. The scheme advanced is not that.

We might all have hoped for something bolder, not least with the government’s decarbonisation strategy due shortly, with air quality issues rising up the agenda, and with COP26 being staged in the UK later this year.

The interesting question therefore is why the scheme is as modest as it is. I have no doubt that both ministers and officials in the DfT will have wanted more, and the rail industry certainly did. I fear once again all signs point to the dead hand of the Treasury.

The inside view there is that the DfT rail function is an out of control bottomless pit and it is up to the Treasury to bring about some financial responsibility, as they would see it. This mindset can be seen in the way rail fares were forced up above inflation this year, in the way TfL have been told to carry out a review of bus and tube services with the expectation that there will be cuts, and by the way Network Rail has been pressured to make savings (some justification for this one).

It is an unpalatable message for the Treasury, but it needs to speculate to accumulate

It also strongly suggests that the Treasury has a limited appetite to continue the emergency funding support for public transport a moment longer than it has to. Yet by forcing up rail fares, stymieing a radical fares and ticketing review, and angling for cuts to services in London, all in the name of financial discipline, it is making it more difficult to get passenger numbers back up, and so more difficult to make up the shortfall from the farebox. It is an unpalatable message for the Treasury, but it needs to speculate to accumulate.

The DfT will, I believe, try to advance the fares agenda by the back door. There is a commitment in the White Paper to an extension of pay-as-you-go in the London and south-east area. That necessarily involves tap-in tap-out, single leg pricing, and a daily cap on cost.

Unlike other options where there are both clear winners and losers (and where naturally the winners keep schtum while the losers moan like billy-o), extension to pay-as-you-go is something of a win-win. TfL’s experience in rolling this out delivered an increase in fare income of 5%, a reduction in overheads, and improved passenger satisfaction.

And there is absolutely no reason why pay-as-you-go should not become the norm in every large conurbation, especially bearing in mind the commitment in the White Paper to more localised control. If bus, light rail and heavy rail can all be linked together, with just one charge for a journey, even if this involves mode change, then the result could be transformational.

This scenario, in essence, is one of “islands and bridges”, concentrated centres with pay-as-you-go, linked by inter-city routes. This is not a new concept. Indeed, it was talked about in my time as a transport minister. But it is perhaps an idea whose time has come.
In the meantime, those of us committed to public transport must continue to press for the root and branch reform to fares and ticketing that is so necessary if we are to make the most of our railway

 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Norman Baker served as transport minister from May 2010 until October 2013. He was Lib Dem MP for Lewes between 1997 and 2015.

 
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.

DON’T MISS OUT – GET YOUR COPY! – click here to subscribe!