2015 fares

Being pedantic all that gets announced today is the possible percentage increase. It'll be a few more weeks, at the earliest, before there is any announcement as to the actual changes. I rather fear, though, that we'll see a repeat of the nonsense we say last year with the Chancellor and Boris trying to outdo each other as the commuter's champion. We will have to wait for the Autumn Statement to see what largesse the Chancellor spreads around to bribe people before the General Election. If the Autumn Statement is as late as December (as it was in 2013) then the Fares Revision will be delayed again. I can remember when the Fares Revision details emerged in September or October and there was a proper amount of time to implement it properly. Ah those were the days!

We also have the complication of the "Part Time Travelcard" which Boris has committed to introduce in January 2015. I have my doubts that the TOCs will sign up to that in time (as it will probably require an amendment to the Travelcard Agreement and all TOCs have to agree and the Secretary of State has to sign off the change) and I also expect it to be for users of contactless bank cards only. I hope I'm proved wrong but we shall see.

From the BBC article

By the looks of it, it a regulated fare is one that set by the government, so your "bog-standard" ticket if you will. I believe unregulated tickets would include tickets such as Southern Daysave and similar tickets which are TOC initiatives. This will be good for the Open Access Operators on the ECML, who won't be forced to increase their prices, bringing them more customers in the face of the higher TOC fares

I believe the concept of regulated fares dates back to the time of rail privatisation. There were concerns that the new private companies would rip off regular users which is why certain ticket types were subject to regulated (controlled) levels of increase. Privatisation actually introduced increases that were RPI-1% so less than inflation increases. The government conceded this point in order to get the legislation through Parliament. This is one of the subtle reasons why, alongside economic growth, that rail patronage has increased over the last 20 years or so. Labour reversed this policy to RPI+1% in 2004 and we've had 10 years of inflation busting rises since.

There was also scope for the TOCs to raise fares by more than the regulated amount where a franchise agreement allowed this. This was certainly the case for South Eastern for example and I'm pretty sure other TOCs have done it. The other trick the TOCs have used is to broaden the time when peak fares apply by introducing restrictions as well as concepts like "super off peak" which is really the old off peak but rebranded so an intermediate "off peak" travel time can be introduced but with higher fares. All about milking the market as much as possible. Finally there is "fares basket" and "flex" which allows TOCs to increase fares more on some routes than on others provided the overall increase is within the required overall limit. That's a simplified view as I'm not very knowledgeable about how "flex" and the "basket" works in practice - happy to be corrected.

I have dug out a Parliamentary Briefing Note which explains rail fares

Its not that bad rincew1nd! I mean one of the bidders for TPE has the same parent companies as GTR, and indeed one of the Northern bidders has the same parent company which has won TSGN! The other 2 TPE ones both have experience in long range operations. Likewise for Northern Proper, serco aren't anywhere to be seen, so if abellio do get it, it'll probably not be purple, and then, Arriva...