All steamed up over high rail fares

Complaints on price should worry firms

A few shards of light have penetrated the perennial gloom of the railway network. In a startling turn of events, passengers seem to be coming round to the view that Britain's trains are not too bad.

In the latest nationwide snapshot of travellers' views, 80% said they were satisfied with their journeys and just 8% said their experience was poor. The figures are the best since detailed polling began in 2001.

Punctuality is no longer the network's achilles heel: satisfaction with timekeeping has risen by 6 percentage points to 77% over the last year.

Instead, the most common whinge is the price of a journey: only 45% of travellers think that rail fares are good value for money, and the research was carried out before the inflation-busting fare rises took effect this month.

The gap between the best and the worst is widening. Gatwick Express, which the late unlamented Strategic Rail Authority wanted to axe, is the most popular rail service with satisfaction of 93%. Midland Mainline, ScotRail, c2c and South West Trains also fared well.

But some familiar laggards are still propping up the table: Thameslink's sardine wagons only rated a paltry 73% satisfaction, equal bottom with Silverlink.

Prices are going to remain a big battleground. The transport secretary, Alistair Darling, is thinking of abolishing price regulation on turn-up-and-go Saver tickets, which could mean a shift towards airline-style pricing with huge penalties for spontaneous travellers who fail to plan in advance.

The Rail Passengers' Council, which curiously has decided to rebrand itself as Passenger Focus at a cost of £60,000, has warned that the industry could be "sleepwalking" towards unaffordable pricing. It is hardly worth investing billions on a punctual railway if nobody has enough money to travel on it.

Shock tactics

The prospect of a sudden oil price rise, a slowdown in global consumption or a big tumble in the US dollar are keeping the Cassandras at the FSA awake at night. In its annual look at the risks facing the financial system, the City regulator is urging firms it oversees to think hard over the repercussions, should such events occur.

The FSA rates the chances of a macro-economic shock occurring this year as higher than in 2005, and it wants banks and other financial firms to do some "stress testing" - subjecting their books and systems to all sorts of simulated pain to find the weak spots.

The FSA suggests stress tests for what might happen if a major pandemic, bird flu, say, ripped through the financial system, if a big corporation went belly-up or there was a terror attack on the financial sector. What the FSA is trying to find out is whether one event, such as a sharp rise in oil prices, might cause more damage than expected because of some unforeseen correlation with a trading position elsewhere. Similar, perhaps, to the butterfly effect often quoted by chaos theorists.

While the FSA can do nothing to stop global shocks, it needs to know what might happen to the financial system if such an event were to occur. And here the message is clear: it is up to senior managers to wake up to their worst nightmares rather than sleep through.

Farnishing trick

Barely a day passes without some gloomy pension issue. Yesterday it was speculation that IBM is about to do a Rentokil and close its final salary schemes to existing members. So where is Christine Farnish, head of the National Association of Pension Funds? The NAPF represents 15 million members of occupational pension schemes but is currently led by an invisible woman.

In the past two months we have seen proposals from Adair Turner threatening an upheaval that will register on the Richter scale. Rentokil has gone where no other company has dared and a steady stream of other big changes, all leaving scheme members worse off, have followed at employers ranging from the Co-Op to the money-lending Provident Financial group. Last week record low yields in the gilts market posed further big problems.

Yet in the past six months Ms Farnish has gone Awol. She has managed only 20 timid comments in mainstream national newspapers, compared with the 100+ racked up by the TUC's Brendan Barber. Time to speak up, Ms Farnish.