The fare freeze won't cut the cost of a site visit

For the first time in thirty years, the government isn't raising the rail fares it controls. From March this year until March 2027, regulated fares in England are frozen — no annual increase, where the government says they'd otherwise have risen by about 5.8%. By its own estimate that hands passengers something like £600 million back this year. If you commute by train, that's straightforwardly good news, and worth saying so plainly.

If you run an MSP, an ISP, or a data centre, and the question in front of you is whether to send your own engineer up to Manchester to deal with something, the freeze is worth a closer look — because it changes less than the headline suggests.

Start with what's actually frozen. The cap is broad — by National Rail's own description it holds Standard-class Season Tickets, Anytime tickets and Off-Peak tickets, so a good deal of ordinary travel genuinely is covered. What it leaves out is where it gets interesting. First Class and Standard Premium aren't included. Nor are the open-access operators — Lumo, Hull Trains, Grand Central — which set their own fares regardless of the freeze. And the cheaper Advance fares are priced by the operators, not capped. So whether a given trip is actually held depends on what gets booked: a Standard Off-Peak return is frozen; a First Class seat, or a cheap Advance booked ahead, is not.

This isn't just our reading of it, either. When the freeze was announced, the Business Travel Association — the body for the firms that manage corporate travel — welcomed it, but its chief executive, Clive Wratten, warned that "freezing fares should be the starting point, not the headline." His point was that the policy was aimed squarely at commuters, with little thought for the many people who travel because a job demands it rather than out of routine — which is the person you'd put on a train to go and fix a switch, not the one going to the same office five days a week. Which is to say it was designed for the person going to the same office five days a week, not the person you'd put on a train to go fix a switch two hundred miles away.

Here's the part that holds even when the fare genuinely is frozen, though. The ticket was never the expensive bit.

Freezing the fare does nothing about the four hours your engineer spends getting there and back, the other work that stalls while they're in transit, the overnight if the job overruns, or the second trip when the first one turned out to be missing a part. Those are the costs that make a site visit expensive, and a fare freeze leaves every one of them exactly where it was. We've set the full arithmetic out over on Do the Maths — the ticket is usually the smallest line on it.

This bites harder the further out your engineer starts. If you're in Wales or Scotland, the freeze isn't some England-only perk you're missing out on — both nations have frozen their own fares for the year too, and Transport for Wales went further than England by freezing Advance fares as well. The headline is good news wherever you are. But a frozen Cardiff-to-Manchester or Glasgow-to-Manchester ticket is still a frozen price on the best part of four hours each way, very possibly an overnight — and the longer the trip, the more the time dwarfs the ticket.

It also hides the seams. A long cross-border trip is rarely one clean train; you'll often change somewhere in England — Crewe, say — and hand off from one operator to the next. Where you do, two different freeze schemes can be holding a single journey's price down, one set in Cardiff or Edinburgh and one in London, each expiring on its own timetable. But the fare is the least of it. Every change is a point of failure, and a late or cancelled leg burns the one thing the trip was already short on — time. A delayed inbound train is an hour lost waiting for the next connection; a cancelled one can cost the afternoon, or the job itself if the access window closes before you arrive. Miss the change on the way home, and a frozen fare is small comfort on a cold platform at half nine. None of that shows up in the phrase "fares are frozen."

So welcome the freeze. It's a good thing, and your commuting staff will feel it. It just isn't aimed at this particular problem. The way to actually cut the cost of a Manchester site visit isn't a cheaper ticket — it's not buying one. Which is rather the point of having hands already in Manchester.