Meeting of the Parliament 09 September 2025
I was rather surprised when I saw that the Scottish Government had pencilled in a debate on railways in Government time. It is about time. Over the years, we have had many a debate about Scotland’s railway.
It is really good to see the Government actively promoting its own U-turns. When it comes to the removal of peak fares, a little bit of honesty would be much appreciated. The Government ended the pilot scheme by claiming that it was unaffordable. Just over a year ago, the cabinet secretary wrote that
“this level of subsidy cannot continue in the current financial climate”.
I get that. In fact, I distinctly remember the cabinet secretary appearing before the Public Audit Committee and defending the reinstatement of peak fares. At that time, she told us that,
“since the pilot ended, rail use has increased”—[Public Audit Committee, Official Report, 23 April 2025; c 10.],
as though that were some sort of rationale for the removal of what had been regarded as a subsidy. That was in April, just five months ago. The Government then said that it would consider removing peak fares
“should UK budget allocations improve in future years”.
Therefore, I am over the moon that the Scottish Government finds itself in an improved financial position and is able to remove peak fares. However, the problem is that they should never have been taken away in the first place—then brought back, and then taken away again.
The economics of the situation point to one reality. The price of train tickets has gone down, which is welcome, and I believe that there is cross-party support for that. However, the cost of operating those services presumably has not come down. Therefore, I must ask: where else in the transport budget has the money to reduce peak fares come from?
It seems counterintuitive that the Scottish Government had a target to reduce car usage by 20 per cent by 2030—a target that it has dropped, I should add—but at the same time made train tickets more expensive. That target was important to the Scottish Government, because it was important to its other goal of cutting our greenhouse gas emissions by three quarters by 2030. That has been dropped, too.
I mention those climate targets for one reason. The Scottish Government had a third target, which was the decarbonisation of all passenger trains by 2035. That has been pushed back by a decade as well. We are still waiting for the refreshed rail decarbonisation action plan, which was supposed to be published in the spring of this year. We are now in September, and we have still to see it—yet here we are, having a debate about the future of Scotland’s rail. I mention that because I think that a rail decarbonisation plan cannot sit in a silo; it must be part of a wider transport decarbonisation strategy and a wider energy strategy.
Why is that? If there is a central Government strategy, it will do two things. First, it will create economies of scale when it comes to infrastructure investment in new green technology. Secondly, it will unlock private investment.
We have heard a little bit about the role that the private sector plays in this new, so-called “publicly owned” rail service. However, the reality is that it is the private sector that manufactures the rolling stock; it is the private sector that supplies the financing and leasing funding arrangements to the Government for pretty much all of its rolling stock; it is the private sector that does the maintenance on the rolling stock and the mid-life overhauls. Therefore, if there is a strategy on things such as hydrogen or battery storage, part and parcel of that should be a strategy for the whole transport sector, which could unlock investment in those technologies.
I agree that we should be celebrating 20 years of devolution of powers on railways. I have no ideological opposition to the way in which the model currently works. We all know the issues that the last operator had. However, as other members have pointed out, there were 17,000 ScotRail cancellations last year. Passenger journey numbers are still lower than before the Covid pandemic and, indeed, they are lower than pre-nationalisation levels. According to the Office of Rail and Road, Scotland was one of only two train operators across the whole of the UK to operate fewer trains in 2024 than it did in 2023.
The cost of this nationalisation must also be talked about. It is not a negative to point out that, according to The Herald, that cost has been £1.47 billion, which represents a rise of 60 per cent from the two years when Abellio operated the franchise.