Rail unions have condemned the 2024 ticket price hikes as a "slap in the face for passengers”
The Senior Assistant General Secretary of the RMT union has slammed rail fare price hikes and debunked the Tory narrative over this year’s ongoing rail disputes.
Speaking to Politics Joe, Eddie Dempsey first dismantled the argument that pay rises for workers would lead to increased ticket prices.
“This is the strange thing, they say we can’t have decent pay rises because it’s going to cause what they call a wage price spiral. And in most of the big disputes you’re seeing, that’s completely untrue,” argued Dempsey.
“Prices are already set by the government in the rail industry. If we get a decent pay rise it’s got no association whatsoever with the cost of fares.”
It comes as rail fares are set to increase by 4.9% next year in England and Wales. Which the RMT slammed as a “slap in the face for passengers”, with government presiding over the “managed decline of the railways”.
Dempsey highlighted that rail fares have gone up every year in line with RPI inflation since the industry was privatised, regardless of whether there have been train strikes or not.
He argued this was why the UK has one of the most overpriced fares in western Europe, and why the service is poor value for money.
“It doesn’t have to be like that, they could reduce fares. Where the money is going out of this industry in profits, that’s where we could make some savings and reinvest that money into bringing fares down and paying the workers to run a decent rail service.”
The government has argued that some fare increases are currently necessary to introduce “cost-saving reforms” and to ensure the “financial sustainability of the railways”.
However Dempsey rebuked the claim that union demands for guards on trains and not just driver-only operations were putting pressure on the rail companies to put ticket prices up, pointing towards company profiteering.
“We think fares actually should be taken down,” Dempsey told Politics Joe. “And they could afford to do that, because of the huge profits that are going on in the rail industry.
“They could reduce the costs of tickets for the travelling public and they could give workers a decent pay rise.
“But instead they choose to put the fares up to keep the profits going to these private companies. And they tell us we’re the ones responsible for a wage price spiral when it’s them putting the prices up.”
RMT union has campaigned for years to bring rail fares down and to make the UK transport system more affordable.
Hannah Davenport is news reporter at Left Foot Forward, focusing on trade unions and environmental issues
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