We need more affordable trains, not fare hikes and service cuts

At the start of the summer I challenged the Scottish Government to commit to scrapping peak rail fares for good.

The trial had been a welcome reprieve for passengers, coming on the back of the above-inflation rise in ScotRail ticket prices.

So it was more than disappointing when the Transport Secretary announced last week, before parliament returned, that peak fares would be reinstated.

Commuters between Falkirk High and Glasgow face forking out an extra £6 for a return journey, a 44% increase. A return from Polmont to Edinburgh will go up from £11.30 to £16.20, and a Larbert to Glasgow return is being racked up by 67%, from £9.50 to £15.20.

Perhaps the Minister had forgotten that in answer to my questions in June she had pointed out that scrapping peak fares meant savings of up to £1,500 a year to “significantly relieve household budgets during the current cost of living crisis”.

Maybe there is a mini wave of selective amnesia sweeping through the Government. Rail users might recall, in the distant past, proposals by ScotRail to cut ticket office hours across the network.

Similar plans in England were ditched by the then Conservative government in October 2023. That’s almost a year ago. It is incomprehensible that Scotland’s Transport Secretary is still sitting with the report in her in-tray, the axe still hanging over services in local stations.

So here we are. Facing a possible reduction in the service for passengers, paying through the nose for the privilege and zero action on the “extremely complex” fares structure that the government’s own Fare Fairs report concluded acted “as a barrier to encouraging [a] shift from car to rail”.

Yet who did the government blame for what it saw as the failure of the peak fares trial? You guessed it, passengers.

All this at a time when the Scottish Government has ditched its 2030 climate change targets, increased its budget for major roads by 25% and cut its budget for rail services by 10%.

We need more affordable and better integrated ticketing and proper staffing on our railways. Not fare hikes and service cuts.