Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and I'm so glad just a couple of

days before Christmas when it might strike you that the travel industry everything to do with

transport is collapsing to bring you some good news yes I definitely want to do that

in fact maybe a little extra bonus bit of good news

as well I will be bringing you, though you won't be surprised to learn there are some caveats.

So, well, just in the past couple of hours, the government has said that it is going to

keep railfare increases to 5.9%.

You might be thinking, what?

So fares for a rubbish service are going to go up by almost 6%.

And I'd say, yes, they are.

And that's going to take a Manchester to London return fare to £391. That's a fair,

it's not a fine. Actually, nobody really pays that, but they certainly shouldn't do. I can tell

you all sorts of ways to avoid it. Effectively, what government is doing is not increasing by the July 2022 RPI,

which was an eye-watering 12.3%. Instead, they've decided to kind of align the increase in fares

with the increase in earnings, which strikes me as a pretty fair, and that's what

they've done. It means that anybody like me who depends on the train, who doesn't have a car,

should be celebrating because the taxpayer subsidy to us from the government, well, actually

from you, the taxpayer, has increased.

So people who don't ever go near a train are required to fund a relative fall in fares.

And that, I think, if you are serious about moving people from road to rail, is a good thing to do.

I don't know that any government could possibly have considered having

a railfare increase at 12.3%. And David Horne, who's the very well-respected boss of state-run L-N-E-R,

...