Six steps to easing the pain for travellers and taxpayers

Everyone seems to be talking about rail fares.

- SIMON CALDER

The excitement is due to the third Wednesday in August traditionally being Act One of the annual festival of rail fare misery. The publication of the retail prices index figure for July has long heralded an outpouring of despair. That is because train tickets normally increase in line with last month's RPI (or sometimes 1 per cent more).

Act Two usually takes place in November, when the rail industry confirms the worst fears of the travelling public. Anyone with a calculator and a bit of time could have worked out the actual fare rises during the previous three months. But there is fresh shock when they are published. For example, a 3.6 per cent rise for 2026 would see the price of a one-way Anytime ticket from Manchester to London rise to exactly £200, and a monthly season ticket from Bristol to Cardiff hit £400.

The last act is performed on the day the rises take effect. Platoons of camera crews converge on a London rail terminal - usually Euston or King's Cross, due to the abundance of coffee facilities as well as fed-up commuters to "vox pop". The finale is the same every year: an unharmonious chorus of condemnation which goes, approximately, "Why should we pay even more for unreliable trains that are standing-room only?"

Ministers hint this cycle is different: that there is nothing special about the July figure that suggests it will define the fare rise early in 2026.

"No decisions have been made on next year's rail fares," a spokesperson for the Department for Transport (DfT) told me. "But our aim is that prices balance affordability for both passengers and taxpayers."

Allow me to add a couple of lines that have unaccountably been left out of the DfT statement: “The way to rescue the railway and reduce the astonishing subsidy of £400 per second taxpayers pump in is to entice more people on board.