Meeting of the Parliament 06 June 2024
I remind members of my voluntary register of trade union interests, and I thank Mark Ruskell for bringing this important debate to the chamber.
Let me start with some basic facts. This year, the Scottish Government has abandoned its 2030 climate change targets—that is a fact. This year, the Scottish Government’s budget for trunk roads is up by 25 per cent, to over £1 billion. It is up by 25 per cent—that is a fact. This year, the Scottish Government’s budget for rail services has been cut by 10 per cent and is now below £1 billion. It has been slashed by 10 per cent—that is a fact. And, this year, the Scottish Government has put rail fares on ScotRail up by nearly twice the rate of inflation, by 8.7 per cent—that is a fact. Peak fares pilots or not, price-sensitive travellers, including some of the poorest passengers, will have stopped using public transport.
Just two weeks ago, the new First Minister, in his first major speech, told us all of his commitment to transparency and openness, highlighting
“the importance of Parliament in scrutinising our record and our plans.”—[Official Report, 22 May 2024; c 24.]
But when it comes to Transport Scotland’s evaluation of this policy, which was presented to Parliament two days ago, I have to say that it is completely lacking in crucial detail and lacking in critical evidence, meaning that Parliament can scrutinise neither the record nor the plan.
So, six months into the trial, we do not know whether there has been an increase in rail travel at peak times, in particular, or, if so, whether it has varied by region. We do not know the impact that the pilot has had on rail travel for passengers who already travel off peak. We do not know to what extent it has got people out of their cars and on to public transport. We do not know because there were 50 million train journeys over the period that was covered by the Transport Scotland report and yet there were fewer than 1,500 responses to the Transport Scotland survey. So, we do not know.
What we do know is that, because of the 8.7 per cent rise in ScotRail fares on 1 April this year, if peak fares were reintroduced to our railways, ticket prices would skyrocket. It would mean that a day return between Dundee and Edinburgh would go up by 22 per cent during peak times. From Ardrossan harbour to Glasgow, the fare would go up by 38 per cent, and, on Scotland’s flagship service between Glasgow and Edinburgh, the price of a day return ticket would shoot up by as much as 48.4 per cent—a near 50 per cent rise overnight. That would, in my view, be reckless, but it would also be heartless, and it would be completely unnecessary.
Back in March, in Parliament, the Cabinet Secretary for Transport spoke of
“medium to longer-term rail fares reform”,
of
“our ambitions on net zero”,
of the need for
“more radical and bold initiatives”,
and of public transport as
“a key enabler for growth and opportunity”.—[Official Report, 28 March 2024; c 54-55, 95.]
These are all reasons why the off-peak fares trial needs to be made permanent and why there can be no going back.
Finally, there is something else. The “Fair Fares Review” report concluded this year that
“Rail fares are extremely complex with a range of products (sometimes as many as ten fare types for one journey depending on where and when the journey is being made).”
It reasoned:
“Passenger research has shown that confusion over buying the right ticket type is acting as a barrier to encouraging modal shift from car to rail.”
That is why the integration of ticketing, which has been promised for the past 12 years but is still awaited, must be introduced. It is why the staff on our trains and in our railway stations must stay. It is why the scrapping of peak fares on our railways must stay, and it is why our ticket offices must stay open as well.