It’s the New Year, which must mean that railway fares are up again – this time by an average of 3.1 per cent. Jeremy Corbyn has said the latest price hike is a ‘disgrace’, and commuters forced to shell out more for their journeys are likely to agree.
No one – not even Chris Grayling – is pretending that Britain’s railways are perfect, or that the system that they operate under does either. The Transport Secretary has in fact explicitly stated this week that ‘the franchising model cannot be the path for the future’. But at the same time, there’s something that’s not said often enough, or even at all: Britain’s rail network is actually not that bad.
As a new briefing by one of my colleagues at the Centre for Policy Studies points out, customer satisfaction ratings in Britain are consistently higher than all other big European rail networks. User numbers have doubled since privatisation; and railway has almost doubled its share of passenger journeys in recent years.
Yes, punctuality is a problem: Britain was ranked 20th in an EU survey in 2016.
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