Ask your MP who the fare system is built for
A standard single from London to Edinburgh costs £25 if you book twelve weeks ahead and £204.80 if you walk up on the day. Same seat, same train, same electricity. The difference is not distance or fuel — it is whether your life is schedulable. That penalty does not fall on people taking holidays. It falls on shift workers whose rota lands a week out, on carers, on anyone travelling to a family emergency, and on everyone whose employer will not confirm a month in advance. The cheapest fares are reserved for the people whose lives are the most predictable, which tends to mean the people who need the discount least. Regulated fares in England are frozen until March 2027 — the first freeze in thirty years. But the freeze covers regulated standard class only. Advance fares are unregulated and operators set them freely, so the long-distance traveller gets nothing from it. Almost nobody knows this. Meanwhile the railway's £11.9bn of public support gets called unaffordable, while the fuel duty freeze has cost £133bn since 2011 and is almost never called a subsidy at all. Jet fuel is untaxed and flights carry no VAT. You have standing here twice over: as a constituent, and as a fare-paying passenger with a right to complain and to escalate.
What we are asking for
Ask your MP to back a cap on walk-up fares relative to the cheapest advance fare on the same route — and to end the tax exemptions that make the highest-emitting way to travel the cheapest to run.
Source: ORR estimates of station usage 2024-25; OBR fuel duty outturn; HMRC Air Passenger Duty rates ↗