The Great British Rail Sale is trolling hard-hit commuters

If the plan was to troll long-suffering commuters, the Government pulled off a blinder with the Great British Rail Sale.

Freshly smarting from extortionately priced tickets to return to work after a sunny Easter weekend, passengers may have sat – if they were lucky – on the train and digested the headlines about a bonanza of cheap tickets.

Or perhaps later they caught the news and saw Grant Shapps grinning, as he relayed the great deals on offer.

Thanks but no thanks: Grant Shapps dressed down and popped up to tell us about the Great British Rail Sale that will help with the cost of living… but it won’t help commuters at all

Maybe, some of those commuters were even so naïve as to think that senior ministers exhorting them to get back into the office – many of whom have drivers, taxpayer-subsidised flats, stick their trains on expenses, decide where they work and have private offices – had recognised their plight in a cost-of-living crisis.

This was it, finally after allowing a 3.8 per cent rail fare hike to go ahead at the start of March, the Government had seen sense and realised people struggling with commuting costs running at a few hundred pounds a month or more needed help.

Except, of course it hadn’t.

Nope, the Great British Rail Sale has nothing to do with reducing the sky-high cost of getting to work, it’s a way of flogging off-peak tickets.

The Great British Rail Sale has nothing to do with reducing the sky-high cost of getting to work, it’s a way of flogging off-peak tickets 

And I suspect that those being heavily discounted at a promised up 50 per cent off aren’t largely the off-peak tickets people need the price reduced on.

My innate cynicism tells me it won’t be the ‘need to travel to another part of Britain on a Friday and return on a Sunday’ rail tickets with prices chopped.

Instead, it will be those at times and days when most working people cannot travel – and are thus in far lower demand that see the discounts.

Not that you’d necessarily realise this from reading the Government press release trumpeting its ‘unprecedented sale’. This sold it as a fantastic opportunity and first of its kind where ‘passengers can get their “next trip at a snip” with savings of up to 50 per cent.’

You had to read quite a way through the announcement – and between the lines – to understand that it only applied to off-peak tickets.

At which point it would have become clear that once more our government has come up with a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist, while ignoring the one that does.

Britain doesn’t have a problem with rail pricing if you can travel whenever you want. For those lucky enough to be able to go mid-afternoon Tuesday, or perhaps late Thursday morning, or whenever else the cheap fares are available, rail travel is pretty cost effective.

The Great British Rail Sale is ideal for that kind of footloose travel.

What it certainly won’t do anything for is those mugs shouldering the massive cost of simply going to work on a train.

Not that you’d know that from the Department of Transport’s bluster. It said: ‘The Government is listening to people’s concerns about rising costs, and is taking action worth more than £22 billion in 2022-23 alone – which includes support with the cost of energy bills and to help to ensure people keep more of their money.

‘Offering half-price rail tickets is one of the ways the Government is further supporting families with the cost of living.’

It’s not really doing that though, is it? It’s not offering half-price tickets when people must get the train and are commuting to work, it’s giving them for discretionary travel.

I’ll declare a vested interest here. I get the train into London’s St Pancras from the commuter belt: it’s a 27 minute journey and it costs £28 a day return.

As a point of comparison, when I lived in London the Tube to work took 34 minutes – that journey costs £5.80.

Those train costs swiftly add up to a lot of money even with season ticket discounts: a weekly ticket for my train would cost £107.80; a monthly one would be £414; and an annual one £4,312.

(None of these figures include Tube travel, I cycle that bit from station to office and back.)

The only sop to pandemic-era commuters has been a half-baked scheme for ‘flexi-travel’, which many say doesn’t really work for them. 

It offers a discount for eight days of travel in 28 days, but this doesn’t help the substantial number doing three or four days per week in the office and is inferior to the previous carnet system of buying books of five or ten similarly-discounted tickets with three-month use-by dates.

At a time of a cost-of-living crisis, commuting costs cut even deeper into people’s monthly budgets. 

For some of our readers I realise those commuting costs will seem exorbitant, but for others who pay even more, my train fares will look quite cheap.

At a time of a cost-of-living crisis, with essentials like energy bills, petrol prices and food shopping soaring, commuting costs cut even deeper into people’s monthly budgets.

People are also acutely aware right now of how much they saved not commuting, when Covid work from home orders were in place. 

You might think it was time for a proper plan to help them, especially considering the economic benefits being extolled of being in the office and the great advantages seeing others brings in elements such as communication, creativity, training, and teamwork.

Motorists got 5p off fuel duty in the Budget, rail commuters got the puff and fluff of the Great British Rail Sale.

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