Meeting of the Parliament 26 February 2025
I acknowledge up front that bringing ScotRail into public ownership has been a welcome move by the Scottish Government that has put the public interest at the heart of our rail services.
However, the cost of rail travel is now the critical issue for travellers. It is time for the Government to intervene, to use its power and to act in the public interest to deliver a more affordable service. We all see from our inboxes that rail travel is now too expensive for too many people, and that ticketing is complex and confusing. The fact that rail fares are even higher in England is cold comfort to our struggling constituents, who want to see action here in Scotland.
The return of peak fares in September last year has seen day ticket prices more than doubling in some cases. A peak-time return from Perth to Glasgow Queen Street station will set a passenger back £40.10, compared with an off-peak ticket costing £20. Meanwhile, people heading from Stirling to Waverley station will pay £19.90 on a peak journey, compared with £12.10 for an off-peak one.
Those are prices before ScotRail’s above-inflation increase to ticket prices of 3.8 per cent. That increase in ticket prices will outstrip percentage increases in many pay packets next month, including those of staff who work here in the Parliament. Unless the Scottish Government revisits the decision to increase rail fares, passengers between Perth and Glasgow Queen Street, for example, will pay £41.62. Tickets that are already too expensive will become even more costly at a time when household budgets are already stretched. Those are eye-watering amounts of money for commuters to be shelling out. Peak-time ticket costs are an unfair tax on working people, and they must be scrapped.
Although I acknowledge that some better deals are now available, such as flexipasses and season passes, those all require commuters to dig deep into their pockets up front. In a post-Covid world in which patterns of work are no longer fixed, investing in a season pass will not be an attractive, convenient or affordable option for many people. However, for many, it will be the only option that they have, if they want to get the train. Of course, flexipasses are not even available on all routes, which means that some passengers are barred from cheaper fares simply because of where they live and the journeys that they make.
The cost crisis has not happened overnight: the price of public transport has been steadily rising for years and years. Over the past decade, we have seen an increase of nearly 70 per cent in the cost of public transport, compared with an increase in motoring costs of only around a third. There is a widening gap between people who drive and those who do not or cannot drive, which will structurally build in car dependency for people in the working-age population who are ineligible for concessionary fare schemes. Working people on low incomes will continue to find their monthly outgoings being dominated by transport costs as much as, if not more than, they are by energy costs.
Bus services might be a cheaper option, and I welcome the constructive agreement that we have reached with the Scottish Government on a future bus fare cap pilot scheme. However, buses do not always provide the fast connection that is needed to get to a place of work or for longer-distance travel. For people with caring responsibilities, especially women, spending hours on a bus—or, indeed, on multiple buses—at either end of a day does not fit with family life. When that is paired with a complex and unintegrated ticketing system, the cost for women of travelling by public transport adds up. It is unclear what progress has been made towards delivering an integrated ticketing system that would go at least some way towards reducing the complexity and cost of journeys in Scotland.