Yahoo Finance Will higher fares pay for bonuses for rail bosses in 2019?
For many passengers on Britain’s railways 2018 has been a grim year.
The government has now come under fire over heavily reduced rail services on some lines during the Christmas break, with Labour condemning the “Boxing Day rail standstill”.
Labour’s shadow transport minister Andy McDonald accused the Conservatives of hypocrisy for allowing Southeastern, Southern, Chiltern and Scotrail to leave passengers with few trains running.
He said they had failed to act despite condemning Boxing Day rail shutdowns while in opposition in the 2000s, but Network Rail said it was carrying out 330 vital improvement works over Christmas and the New Year.
The festive shutdown is just another frustration to add to a long list of issues causing irritation at best and misery at worst among passengers in 2018.
Disastrous timetable changes
Patience and trust among commuters is fraying, with the disastrous rollout of timetable changes in May one of the main headaches of the past year.
Thousands of trains were cancelled or severely delayed on lines run by Govia Thameslink Railway and Northern, with transport secretary Chris Grayling ignoring repeated calls to resign over the chaos.
One in five passengers experienced “intensely inconvenient and costly disruption to their daily lives”, as the chair of Westminster’s transport select committee put it.
It sparked a campaign from politicians, newspapers and commuters across the north to prioritise its infrastructure needs, saying the timetable woes were a symptom of historic under-investment in northern train services.
Strike disruption over the role of guards
Commuters have also faced days of severe disruption because of strike action in the ongoing row over plans to introduce driver-only trains without guards.
Passengers will be praying to avoid a repeat of the same kind of problems as last January, which saw staff at five different companies walk out in the same week.
The bitter dispute has rumbled on in some parts of the country, with workers on Northern and South Western Railway striking for 24 hours last week over fears for guards’ jobs.
South Western Rail will see further strikes on 27 and 31 December, while unionised staff at Northern plan walkouts every Saturday until the end of January.
Price hikes in the New Year
The frustrations of the past year have made many customers even more angry about annual price hikes, with fares set to be 3.1% up from 2 January 2019.
Many commuters will face increases of hundreds of pounds on their annual travel spending, despite calls from transport campaigners for a freeze for regions hit worst by disruption.
The Guardian’s northern editor was so angered by the news that she has urged commuters to join her in refusing to pay the difference on the increased fare in the New Year.
The increases may be to fund more crucial investment and profits may be slimmer than widely imagined, but passengers are often frustrated not to see clearer evidence of improvements for themselves.
So will rail chiefs be in the money?
Fare increases may prove the final straw for commuters when combined with one other possible scenario in the year ahead – even higher salaries or bonuses for rail chiefs.
Some rail chiefs could enjoy huge pay rises and take home home six- or seven-figure sums in 2019, if past years are anything to go by.
A Mirror investigation last year revealed average pay rises of £20,000 for the heads of 13 large British rail companies, with an average salary of £344,000 – twice that of the prime minister.
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Top officials at Network Rail said earlier this year that they would not take their 2018 bonuses over the timetable shambles.
If passengers face similar disruptions in 2019, the highly paid heads of leading train companies should follow their lead and refuse to take pay rises or bonuses.
The public may not thank them, but it’s impossible to know what the public would do if the rail industry failed them once again – and probably best not to find out.
