Rail Fares

Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill Excerpts

Thursday 18th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pidgeon]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to simplify rail fares for passengers.

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill) (Lab)]

My Lords, the fragmented railway we inherited has a fares system that passengers neither understand nor trust. We are addressing this through delivering pay-as-you-go, with simpler fares in London and the south-east, Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, and trialling digital pay-as-you-go in the east Midlands and Yorkshire. On long-distance routes, we are learning from the LNER trial to make long-distance fares easier to understand.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

I thank the Minister for his Answer. While it is good to hear about initiatives in some parts of the country, passengers have faced rail fare increases year after year for an unreliable service. I therefore ask the Minister, when will passengers have simplified rail fares so they can be confident they are not being ripped off every time they catch a train?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is right that people are very uncertain about buying tickets and do not trust that they are getting the best value. The fares system has grown like Topsy over the last 30-odd years. There are 50 million fares in the British railway system and, in order to eat the elephant, we have to do it in pieces. We are starting; nobody has previously started. The noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin, once said to me that he had tried to do it as Secretary of State and the system had not allowed him to make the progress he had hoped for. We are making progress, but it will take time. Meanwhile, the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act has enabled train operations to come back into public ownership. The noble Baroness will know, because she met the managing director of South Western Railway, that he inherited a fleet of 90 trains, 84 of which were in sidings. Today, 21 of them are in service. I think that that is progress.

[Lord McLoughlin (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister rightly pointed to my complete failure as Secretary of State for Transport. However, will he reassure us that in the brave new world he is promising for the railways, where the Treasury will be totally onside with everything he wants to do, he will manage to see a simplified rail fare system? When people say “simplified”, what they usually want is a cheaper rail system. What does he think the chances are when he is controller of Railways UK and the Treasury is the chairman?

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[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Lord was not an absolute failure in the job; he was brilliant, and he of course appointed a very competent chair of Network Rail in his time—for which I am grateful, but my wife is not. My noble friend Lord Livermore is sat next to me, and he deals with Treasury matters; for the moment, at least, I deal with transport and the railways. The truth is that the railways are in a very bad financial position. They are taking twice the subsidy that they did pre-Covid, and they do not run very well—the noble Lord is right about that. We have a huge amount of work to do. Matters such as the balance between fares and subsidy and the performance of the railway need to be addressed, which is why the Government are addressing them through the public ownership Act and the Railways Act. It will take time—the system has taken 200 years to create—but we are determined to make a real difference in the course of this Parliament.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, the present system of passenger compensation for when the train is late seems to work well, in my experience. Will that change with the new, wonderful structure that the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin, outlined? Who will pay the compensation to passengers?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend. It is right that there is compensation. The rates vary and the system of paying it is complex; for example, if you have bought your ticket from a third-party ticket retailer, it is sometimes not easy to get your money back through Delay Repay. We know that we need to address all those things. In the end, GBR will be operating the public sector railway, and therefore the system for people to make claims will inevitably be simplified.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, as a general South Western Railway passenger, it used to take three hours for me to get to Devon, but it now takes just under four. I now go by GWR, which takes two hours and 10 or 20 minutes to get to roughly the same area. I absolutely do not understand why something cannot be done to deal with South Western Railway, a point already raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I think the noble and learned Baroness is referring to the Salisbury to Exeter line, which has a long history. It was built cheaply to compete with Great Western Railway. The cuttings are steep and the tunnel portals are surrounded by earth, but, sadly, this summer journey times have been extended due to soil moisture deficit, which is a modern problem. The management of SWR has every intention of getting back to the normal timetable, but they must operate the railway safely in the meantime. I would be very happy to introduce the noble and learned Baroness to the new managing director, so he can explain that to her himself, because he is responsible for both its operations and its infrastructure.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, discount railcards such as the senior railcard can be an expensive lump sum for many people. Is the Minister looking at proposals for some kind of loyalty card to encourage people more widely to choose the railway for their journeys?

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[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Baroness highlights that the number of discount cards has grown over the years. Some of them have different conditions from others, so it is quite hard to understand, if you do not have one, which one might be applicable. We are mindful that, when GBR is up and running, it addresses consistency and examines what else can be done to encourage people to travel by train.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, fare simplification, by definition, means that there will be fewer fares options. Can the Government guarantee that, under their simplification programme, no individual fare will go up purely because of fare simplification?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Lord has some background in this, because he was deputy chair of Transport for London and, I think, the Deputy Mayor for Transport. He knows perfectly well that, when we rationalised the fare structure on the Tube, some fares did go up while others went down. We made sure that the fares that went up were generally ones that a lot of people did not pay for and that the benefits were found across the system. If we have 50 million fares, we inevitably need to reduce that number and ensure that they are balanced. The noble Lord has some experience of balancing them within an overall fare rise, so he should use that knowledge to his own advantage, because I do not particularly want to tell him this again.

[Lord Beamish (Lab)]

My Lords, in introducing this Question, the noble Baroness talked about terrible railways. I know that, for many people, the world stops outside London and the south-east of England. As a regular traveller on LNER for the last 23 years, I think it is a very good system, with dedicated staff, and the timings are good. It is an example of what can be done with a nationalised railway system. I urge my noble friend to see what can be done to simplify the offer of tickets, because it is complex even on that line. But it is not all doom and gloom on our railways.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

That is a very welcome sentiment, and I appreciate it. We are trying hard, as is the management of LNER, to get some rationalisation into this, and it is convenient for people. The proposition that you can buy a ticket with plus or minus 70 minutes means that you do not have to travel on the train that you thought you might; there is some flexibility. Regardless of some of the comments about individual fares, the new system is proving very popular, and enormous numbers of tickets are being bought. For example, for the booking horizon between August and December, 1.1 million new semi-flexible tickets are available that are priced at less than the super off-peak fare. People are discovering that a different methodology for this works.

[Lord Craig of Radley (CB)]

My Lords, I have suffered a number of cancelled trains on my journeys, and cancellations have been explained as being due to a driver shortage. Is there a driver problem—a lack of numbers—or is there some other likely explanation?

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[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble and gallant Lord is right: there is a driver shortage. Most train operating companies do not have enough drivers to staff the service. Although one would like to measure the railways in terms of passenger outcomes, I have determined that the number of drivers be one of the input measures of the business plans of all train operating companies, whether they are publicly or privately owned. Since Covid, a number of companies have not made enough progress in increasing the number of drivers. It is completely unacceptable, and we are in the course of correcting it.