Rail fares in England and Wales will rise by 4.9% on Sunday, adding hundreds of pounds to annual travel costs for many commuters.
Campaigners said passengers would be “rightly angry” at the latest increase, above the current inflation rate of 4%, despite the government arguing that it had made a significant intervention to keep the fare rise down.
Ministers said the decision was “striking a balance”, with rail revenues still about 20% below pre-pandemic levels and the railway requiring larger-than-usual public subsidy.
However, the increase comes in contrast to policy in London, where Tube and bus fares will be frozen for another year. Cheaper rush-hour travel will also be introduced in the capital next week, with the abolition of peak fares on Friday.
Rail passenger groups warned that the continued rise in rail fares – after the largest increase in a decade, a 5.9% hike in March 2023 – was pushing people to switch from the railway to the roads, with fuel duty on petrol falling in real terms after being frozen over a decade of inflation.
The campaign group Railfuture said passengers were “being punished year after year with inflation-busting fare rises”. Its chair, Chris Page, said: “No matter that there’s a cost of living crisis, a climate emergency, the government seems more determined than ever to price us off the railway and on to the roads.”
Analysis from the Campaign for Better Transport showed that the rise would add more than £300 to annual season tickets for popular commuter routes, including Canterbury or Brighton to London, and almost £150 extra from Macclesfield to Manchester or York to Leeds.
Spokesperson Michael Solomon Williams said: “At a time when we urgently need to encourage people to take the train, the public will rightly be angry to discover that it has just become even more expensive to do so.
“Meanwhile fuel duty has been frozen for 13 years, meaning the government has forgone £100bn … If the government is serious about encouraging people to take the train and meeting our net zero targets then it is rail fares, not fuel duty, which should be frozen.”
Johnbosco Nwogbo, of the public ownership campaign group We Own It, said the cost of travelling by rail had increased substantially since privatisation. “Under public ownership, we could be saving enough to bring down [rail fares] by 18% instead of raising them by 4.9%,” he added.
The Department for Transport declined to comment anew, but Mark Harper, the transport secretary, argued in December when the rise in England was first announced that it was much lower than the July 2023 RPI figure of 9%, which had traditionally been used by the government to set annual increases.
He said that taxpayers had provided £12bn in support for the railways in the last year and the rise “strikes a balance to keep our railways running, while not overburdening passengers”.
Transport for Wales last month followed suit, announcing that fares would also rise 4.9% from 3 March. An even bigger increase, of 8.7%, will be applied in Scotland from April, although ScotRail fares rose by a smaller amount, 3.8%, last year.
Fares for single Tube, Overground and bus fares will be frozen in London, although daily fare caps on multiple journeys will rise.
Transport for London will also start a three-month trial next week where Friday travel counts as off-peak all day, with the recovery in post-Covid passenger numbers much lower than on other days. The £24m pilot was announced by the mayor, Sadiq Khan, and will cut the cost of a rush-hour Tube journey from outer London by £2, to £3.60.
Khan said: “Encouraging more people back into the city on Fridays could give a much-needed boost to the hospitality, business and leisure sectors. So, I’m making a call to all Londoners: to help London keep roaring back – let’s do Fridays.”
