Commuters face peak fare rises

Rail commuters were told today they will have to pay higher fares for mainline services.

The warning was confirmed by Richard Bowker, chairman of the governing Strategic Rail Authority, who said that "some tough decisions will have to be made".

The new fare structure will come into force in January 2004.

London commuter companies including Connex, South West Trains and South Central, which carry more than half the 500,000 passengers who travel into the capital during the morning peak, have been pressing the authorities to allow them to raise fares.

All three companies suffer severe overcrowding which will get worse. Government forecasts are for rail travel to increase by 50 per cent in the next decade.

Wendy Toms, chairman of the Rail Passengers Council for Southern England, said higher fares might be used to limit overcrowding on the busiest lines.

She added there is now the risk that a change in fares policy could be used to argue for the "watering down" of the present regulation of peak-hour fares in London and the South-East.

This would be "on the grounds that the present system, linked with performance, has not worked, that higher fares might reduce overcrowding on peak-hour trains and that increased revenue as a result would reduce the (subsidy) burden on the taxpayer."

Mrs Toms said the changes now being proposed could "take us back to the bad old days of British Rail when in some years fare increases were well above the rate of inflation in an attempt to price off passengers."

She said the fact that people still use the trains to get to work in London "despite the often unreliable services" and with surveys showing they are getting little value for money "suggests that they have little or no choice but to do so".

"To increase their fares in these circumstances would be to penalise further a captive market".

Mrs Toms said the view of her committee is that fares should not be raised in advance "to pay for improvements that some of today's passengers might not see".

Fares are currently pegged to a complex formula and can only increase by one per cent below inflation - but on top of that there is a leeway of between minus and plus two per cent depending on how well the service has performed during the past year.

This year many commuters did not have to pay any increase. Some fares even went down but that was only because the service was so poor. That could all now change.

The regulations come to an end next year and the train companies, which have been spending hundreds of millions of pounds on new rolling stock, want to charge more to increase profits.

Off-peak fares are not governed by the regulations. The pressure being applied by the train companies is revealed in an SRA report which states there are aspects of the current regulations which are "placing a severe strain on operators' ability to set a logical fares structure."

SRA chairman Mr Bowker added: "The time is right for a thorough investigation of rail fares. The original policy (of regulation) achieved many of its objectives and has helped to bring growth of a third in rail passenger volume. The debate starts here."

The SRA has now launched a huge consultation programme involving the rail companies and passenger watchdogs.

Transport minister David Jamieson told MPs that the rail industry "cannot proceed on a blind assumption that existing policies in areas such as fares, which are key to the further development of the railways, can continue indefinitely."

Cynthia Hay, of the passenger pressure group Capital Transport, said: "The transport minister's disparaging reference to fares regulation as a 'blind assumption' strongly suggests that the Government intends to require rail commuters to make substantially increased contributions to the finances of Britain's privatised railways.

"The odds are stacked against retention of the fare-capping system which protected rail commuters by linking fare increases on season tickets to the retail price index."

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