Hansard

I join members in thanking Bob Doris for securing this very timely debate. It echoes the debate that I led on the same topic in February, but I think that we are now in much happier times on the issue. Alongside my Scottish Green colleagues, rail unions and commuters, I am delighted that peak rail fares are now gone for good.

It has been quite a journey to get here. A six-month pilot that introduced off-peak all-day tickets was secured by the Greens, working with the Government, in 2023. It was extended to nine months before ending a year ago. Now, the scheme is back, and commuters are enjoying those savings once again.

Scrapping peak rail fares is all about making travel cheaper and simpler at a time when many households are still struggling to make ends meet. Peak fares have always been a tax on workers who have no say in what time they travel to work. As pre-Covid work patterns started to return in 2022, the absurdity of spending £30 a day to travel from Edinburgh to Glasgow hit home for many workers. Workers having to spend most of their morning’s wages just to pay for their commute was never right. It was simply not credible to run a nationalised rail service with fares set at extortionate levels. That marginalised rail as an option that was available only for the well paid or for those who, like us in this chamber, are on expenses.

The nine-month pilot got results. It resulted in a nearly 7 per cent increase in passenger numbers and an extra 4 million journeys by rail, half of which would have been otherwise taken by car. With transport accounting for a third of Scottish carbon emissions, it was a win for the climate, too. However, the policy clearly needed time to bed in to convince more people to make the switch.

The magic of the railways is that they shrink Scotland. They make job options viable that would otherwise require people to move house or to sit in spirit-crushing traffic jams for hours on end every day. As a result, they help to keep children in schools in the communities where they are settled. They allow people to choose between having one or two cars—or even no car at all.

However, the power of the railways to shrink Scotland works only if rail is affordable. It takes time for everyone to take stock of a big change such as the scrapping of peak fares and to make choices about where to live and what job to take in the future. It will take time to bed in, but now that certainty has been given that peak rail fares are gone for good, it will enable more people to choose rail as a more attractive option for travel.

It is important that the simple daily savings are understood better so that people can make such choices. Perth to Glasgow is a popular fast commute by train, and it is now £20 cheaper than the old peak price. Stirling to Edinburgh is another really busy commute—it is the one that I take—and the cost of it is down from nearly £20 to about £12 a day.

The introduction last year of better deals on passes was also welcome for those who were prepared to make a commitment to regular travel by rail, but the passes were never a substitute for a cheaper flat fare that meets the demands of a post-Covid world.

I will always remember the queue of people at Queen Street station—I was in that queue—on the day that peak fares were brought back in by the Government. It was chaos. People were confused and angry about having to upgrade tickets because they had missed the off-peak fare by just a few minutes. That is gone now—peak fares are gone. I am pleased that the Government has listened to those passengers, to the rail unions, which have been persistent in their campaigning on the issue, and to the Scottish Greens. We have now ended peak fares for good.