Rail travel has never been cheap, but should we really each be paying £500 a year even if we never set foot on a train? That, according to figures released by the Office of Rail and Road today, is astonishing sum that each household had to contribute to government subsidies for running the railways in the year to March 2022: a total of £13.3 billion.
That is just the subsidy for running existing services; it doesn’t include the billions being spent on HS2. Not that this largesse has, of course, prevented rail workers from demanding above-inflation pay rises, and striking when they are denied them. If they were working in any other hopelessly unprofitable industry they would long since have been put out of a job.
It is time the government stopped sitting on the fence and told the rail industry that the party is over
Surely, one of the main reasons for privatising the railways was to relieve taxpayers of the financial burden of running them.
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