Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what recent comparative assessment he has made of the (a) financial and (b) environmental costs of travelling by (i) train and (ii) aircraft on journeys in the UK.

The Department for Transport has made an estimate of the percentage change in real terms of the average financial cost to the individual of travelling by train and aircraft on journeys made in the UK. For travel by train, the Department publishes statistics on travel costs, based on data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), in the Transport Statistics Great Britain compendium. This is available from Table TSGB1308 at the link below:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/transport-expenditure-tsgb13.

The costs of travelling by air within the UK are not available from ONS data. However, DfT estimates are available based on fare data collected from the Civil Aviation Authority passenger survey from 2000. The real cost of the average UK one-way air fare, including taxes and charges, covering domestic flights from 2010 to 2017 decreased by 22%. From 2015 to 2017 the real cost decreased by 7%.

The Department has not recently made a comparative assessment of the environmental costs of travelling by train and aircraft on journeys in the UK.