Is travelling by ScotRail supposed to be miserable and expensive?

Standing on the train platform this morning, the first chill of Autumn just beginning to creep into the air, the service running a respectable two minutes late, I took comfort in the fact that in just a few short weeks I’ll have the privilege of paying £16.30 for my return journey, rather than the current £10.30.

While some may scoff at the idea of paying over 50% more to sit on a service from North Ayrshire to Glasgow which is often overcrowded and frequently late, I’m of the belief that travelling to work should be as miserable and expensive as possible. It makes you appreciate the weekends more.

In my weaker moments though I do sometimes wonder whether the best part of £20 for a 30-minute journey each way is quite the value for money for which one might hope, and how the abandonment of a pilot scheme which reduced prices by scrapping peak fares will help anyone.

In mitigation the Scottish Government will introduce from October 1, the day the pilot scheme ends, a 12 month discount on season tickets but that’s a sticking plaster at best and, if the peak fares pilot is any guide, will be gone in a year anyway. On my route I could actually get travel for a year for around £5.30 a day, if I wanted to get the train 365 days a year or had a spare £1,928 lying about.

There are those who would paint this fiasco as a failure of the Scottish Government’s nationalisation of ScotRail, but in principle the idea was the right one.

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The privatisation of the rail network was always doomed to failure, because none of the benefits of capitalist free enterprise can be applied to it. You cannot have two train companies operating on the same line, for obvious reasons, therefore any franchisee holds a monopoly as soon as it is awarded the contract.

The automotive industry can make their vehicles cheaper, or safer, or more fuel efficient – or at the top end of the market bigger, or faster, or more luxuriant – to try and attract custom, meaning a wider range of choice for the consumer.

In the case of a private rail franchise, there is no competition and therefore no incentive to innovate or bring prices down. Indeed, cold capitalist logic would dictate companies charge as much as the market will bear while spending as little as they can get away with.

Every other country in Europe understands this implicitly. From Budapest to Bilbao, Norrköping to Naples, rail remains almost exclusively in the hands of the state.

If one wanted to cover the 88 miles from Milan to Turin on high-speed rail on October 1 – the day ScotRail brings back peak fares – at peak hours the cheapest return comes in at around £22.50, with the journey just over an hour. To travel under 50 miles from Edinburgh to Glasgow in the same time or more would be £31.40.

Just to rub salt into the wound, many of the state companies which run cheaper, faster, better trains in their home countries operate franchises in the UK. Trenitalia is involved in Avanti West Coast, Arriva is a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn, Abellio, which previously operated ScotRail, is owned by the Dutch national railway company.

Add to that the fact operators are not responsible for the infrastructure of the railways themselves and the attendant costs, that’s the job of Network Rail. The UK government did try privatising that too, but it turned out Railtrack PLC didn’t really see the financial benefit in safety upgrades and trains developed an unfortunate habit of crashing, as did its share price, and it was nationalised again in 2002.

The problem, then, is not that the network was taken back into public ownership, it’s how Holyrood has decided to operate it.

The most recent ScotRail accounts to March 2023 showed a 42% increase in revenue and a 36% increase in journeys with a pre-tax loss of just £118,000. The trial scrapping of peak fares was introduced in October of that year and, by the Scottish Government’s own figures, increased passenger numbers by a further 6.8%.

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Holyrood says it would have had to have seen a 10% uplift to be “self-financing”, but that’s a very narrow way of looking at the problem – why should it be?

Budgets may be tight, but encouraging the use of the railways brings numerous benefits. Discouraging commuters from travelling into our towns and cities is hardly going to help the problems the high street faces. To take just one small example, a person driving their car into work isn’t going to stop at a bar for a couple of post-work pints on a Friday.

As has been pointed out, too, the Scottish Government has made much of its net zero targets, yet allowed just a year to try and convince the populace to make the ‘modal shift’ to rail.

Hiking up rail fares on people who are already struggling to make ends meet isn’t just bad form – it’s bad politics from a government which can ill-afford bad PR.