Meeting of the Parliament 11 September 2024
My fare from East Kilbride to Edinburgh will rocket by 83.8 per cent. That is not a saving.
In March, the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, Unite the union, the Transport Salaried Staffs Association, the Scottish Trades Union Congress, Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, Transform Scotland, Friends of the Earth Scotland and the Just Transition Partnership issued a letter to Fiona Hyslop. It read:
“If you were to restore peak fares it would be a retrograde step that would send exactly the wrong message at the wrong time. We urge you to do the right thing, scrap peak fares permanently to help Scotland meet its climate targets”.
Mike Robinson of Stop Climate Chaos Scotland will be delighted that I am quoting him. In March, he said:
“If we are serious about tackling the climate crisis, along with reducing inequality and improving health and wellbeing, it’s a no-brainer that using public transport should be cheaper than driving.”
I would not want to leave out my good friend Kevin Lindsay of ASLEF, who, in May, said:
“Surely just at the time the Scottish Government has backtracked on its net zero targets they should be doing all they can to make our trains more affordable and reduce CO2 emissions from road travel, which their own policy is committed to.”
Not for the first time, Mr Lindsay is bang on the money, as is Alex Rowley, whose amendment we will support because it calls on the Government to reverse that retrograde step. The Government amendment does not do that, so it should be rejected.
I should say that I would have been happy to support the Greens’ amendment, too, had it been selected for debate, and I give them credit for their work in getting peak fares scrapped in the first place, although, of course, others were also calling for the same thing.
If we want to get greater numbers of people to use public transport instead of driving, we have to make it simple and affordable. However, the service also has to be reliable, and it has not been. Almost 6,000 ScotRail trains have been cancelled since April, and more than a quarter of a million pounds has been paid out in compensation for delayed or cancelled trains. Two million pounds has been paid out since the nationalisation that was supposed to make things better. We have an unreliable service, and now it is to be more expensive. If the policy was to get more people on to the roads, that would be genius.
Fiona Hyslop has not been able to explain how increasing fares will help the Scottish Government achieve its ambition of cutting car miles by a fifth by 2030. Last week, the dire programme for government warned darkly of “demand management” measures. People might be tempted to hop in the car rather than taking the train from now on. However, I say to drivers of Scotland, “Beware: the SNP is coming for you”. The SNP Government is just not saying what it has in store yet. Maybe it is road pricing. It will certainly coin it in on that, at this rate.
It may surprise members to know that I do not always agree with the RMT, but, last week, it produced a critique of the Government’s backward decision that was spot on. It said—quite rightly—that the evaluation of the trial looked at the impact on overall demand and did not assess the impact on demand in peak time only.