The £49 eco-friendly railcard which could revolutionise Britain’s trains
Going to the office on a Monday morning is painful for many reasons, not least the price of the daily commute. In 2023, research from private pension provider Penfold found that it cost £6.94 on average for a peak-time single journey on the UK’s most-used routes. That amounts to more than £3,000 per year for people working in the office five days per week and taking 25 days of holiday.
Prohibitively expensive fares are one of the factors behind a Greenpeace report commissioned from transport think tank Greengauge 21, which suggests that the UK could benefit from a “climate card” subscription scheme, similar to some on offer on the Continent. The scheme would allow passengers to pay a monthly fare for rail travel, rather than be at the mercy of differences in peak and off-peak costs or rocketing prices for last-minute tickets. Greenpeace suggests £49 as a starting point, and hopes it would encourage more travellers to use Britain’s railways instead of their cars.
“If the country is going to meet our climate goals, obviously we need to shift vehicle use from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles. But, at the same time, there’s a huge tail of internal combustion engines out to the 2050s and we need to get roughly 10 per cent of those journeys on to public transport. Really, the only way of doing that is to reduce the cost,” says the organisation’s senior campaigner, Paul Morozzo.
With a shift in working patterns – particularly post-Covid – government figures show rail passenger numbers reducing more than 20 per cent in 2022/3 compared with 2018/19, but Mark Smith of rail travel website seat61.com believes a “climate card” scheme could encourage more people back onto the tracks.
“It turns the car-rail situation on its head,” he says. “Instead of car ownership, tax and insurance being paid and the marginal cost of a car journey only being the fuel, it becomes the train that’s 100 per cent pre-paid, so effectively free, leading to a switch from road to rail for extra trips. It could reduce congestion in many British cities.”
Figures in London, where contactless payment is quick, easy and transparent back this up: 25 per cent of journeys were made on public transport in the capital in 2022, as opposed to five per cent in the East Midlands and three per cent in the South West. Greenpeace suggests that the scheme would exclude profitable inter-city and Greater London services initially.
“Our proposal doesn’t include trains going in and out of London because you’d lose too much revenue,” says Morozzo. “It’s a proposal for the rest of the country, a kind of levelling-up proposal because, historically, investment in transport has been much higher per capita in the south-east than in the north and the Midlands.”
It would also be aimed at regular commuters rather than occasional leisure travellers, who might not see savings with a monthly fee. “While UK train travel can also be very expensive – a Trenitalia ticket for the eight-hour journey from Naples to Bolzano costs as much as the [one-hour] journey between Oxford to London in peak hours – our Advance Fares offer some of the cheapest rail around,” says Cat Jones, founder and CEO of the flight-free operator Byway Travel.
Schemes for success
A monthly subscription scheme has proved a big hit in Austria, where KlimaTicket Ö allows use of all of the country’s public transport (excluding tourist services and some regional exceptions) for a flat annual fee of €1,095. In Germany, a Deutschlandticket priced at €49 per month was introduced in 2023 and gives holders access to public transport across the country, excluding high speed and inter-city services.
Not every scheme has been without issue, however. Ideas for a French pass (also priced at €49 per month and excluding the country’s TGV services) were heavily curtailed by the time of its launch in 2024: it was only valid for travel in July and August and for those aged under 27. It also excluded Paris and the wider Île-de-France region. Three regions negotiated compensation for loss of revenue caused by its hurried implementation according to French newspaper Le Monde.
Meanwhile, though rail use has increased by 28 per cent in Germany since the introduction of the Deutschlandticket according to Greenpeace, the scheme required significant federal and state government financial assistance in 2024 (totalling €3 billion). In 2025, the monthly subscription fee will increase to €58.
The UK would also have to ready itself for spending. An estimate contained in the Greenpeace report suggests a €45 million loss in revenue if each customer using the scheme makes around 26 trips per month. However, a second, far more cautious estimate based on passengers making 40 trips per month (the equivalent of a five-day commute to the office) shows a £637 million shortfall. On top of that, investment would be required to make the scheme workable and the service attractive to customers.
However, Labour’s plans for the railways (and, indeed, the Conservative’s Great British Rail ones before them) suggest significant long-term savings could be made with centralised control and, in Labour’s case, renationalisation. In any case, Morozzo believes investment would pay dividends in the long-term.
“You have to make a massive investment in the railways, you have to improve them. You have to increase the number of services, you have to lengthen the trains by adding extra carriages on lots of lines, in the north in particular,” says Morozzo. “Although that sounds expensive, in the end, it pays itself back. You get a huge economic boost if you invest in transport for obvious reasons because you expand the economic possibilities of the working population and businesses.”
