Can we please stick to just discussing the actual white paper in this thread please.
If anyone wishes to post about political matters, feel free to create a new thread (if there isn't one already) in the appropriate area of the forum, thanks 
Edit: for political discussion regarding this white paper please use https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/is-labours-railway-white-paper-good-government-policy.202942/ thanks!
My thoughts on the white paper is that it's well
intentioned but, as far as fares are concerned, they do have some misunderstandings; clearly there are gaps in their knowledge. As it happens, I tried to get involved but the person doing the fares part of it didn't really seem to want to engage with me so I gave up.
From a fares perspective, what they want to achieve is ambitious and would require a lot more subsidy. I personally
would be happy to pay more tax to fund this. But I am far from convinced that everyone will.
They start by saying:
GB Rail will allow for simpler and more affordable fares, ...
So, let's take Sheffield to Derby. If you are to be more affordable you cannot increase the cost of an Off Peak Day Return (
CDR), which is £12.60.
So that means that you need to have a single fare of £6.30 at off peak times. If you keep fares simple, you can probably rule out having any fares other than Anytime and Off Peak (ie. no Super Off Peak). The current cost of an Anytime Single is £23.30. So the cost of an Anytime Single is going to have to come down a lot to avoid a huge cliff edge (which would be percieved as "unfair").
Obviously that's great for passengers, but it means that business users will be paying less and therefore taxpayers must pay more.
They also say
...simple, London-style ticketing system across the nation, delivering contactless payments and creating zonal rail fares ...
...We will work with local transport authorities to define ‘islands’ within which zonal rail fares apply across all modes of public transport..
...Longer distance rail journeys will form ‘bridges’ between the islands, for trips where passengers need to know the price in advance to judge whether to flex their journey time to get off-peak rates. Fares for these journeys will become simple and transparent, with mainly distance-related, ‘single-leg’ pricing, where the return price is always the combined outward and return leg prices. Apart from higher ‘peak’ prices other complexities will be wiped out.
But the devil will be in the detail; if York is not in an "island" then we will lose out. And what of places like Warrington; will they be outwith both GM and Merseyside islands? Or will it be in both? Whatever system they choose, I doubt they will ever achieve a system where it is never cheaper to "split".
And as for this:
As part of the reforms, Labour will guarantee fair rail fares for part-time workers by ensuring they don’t pay more per trip than holders of weekly season tickets
This is difficult to achieve, and again it means giving loads more people a discount, so taxpayers have to fund it.
They also mention:
..affordable fares to disadvantaged groups..
This hints at a means-tested Railcard scheme but I could be misinterpreting that.
I would also read it that fares are going to either NOT going to be set on market-based pricing, or if they are, that would be very minimal. If they do abolish a market-based pricing approach, while retaining the existing good value fares, it means many fares are going to have to reduce, while some will need to reduce a lot. This means they need to increase capacity to cope with the demand. So revenue would reduce while costs would increase. It's all great in theory, but I am not sure that it is going to be affordable.
Edit: here are the comments I am not sure are helpful; clearly these are comments made by members of the public and they are used as examples for why the system needs to change:
Trying to get a cheaper ticket to get from the North West to the West Country is a nightmare. The only way is to break the journey into bits and buy a series of tickets and hope, desperately hope, that the trains run on time to get the connections as the cheaper tickets are for set trains.”
There is no need to hope anything as the tickets remain valid; the industry has made this absolutely clear.
If the Grand Central train to Halifax is just a few minutes late we miss our connection to Northern trains and are faced with a wait of up to an hour.
Sometimes connections should be held but not always. I would definitely agree that more connections should be held than is the case at present, but I am not convinced this is a good example to use. There can't be many examples of a wait of an hour at Halifax from a GC train, and I am not convinced they would be held even if it was all one operator; to hold many more trains you probably need more infrastructure
When going to the airport I bought the cheaper Thameslink only ticket. However that train was cancelled and the next train that took me there on time was Southern so I had to get another ticket.
Well, two issues there; firstly the ticket was arguably valid (though that is a can of worms we probably shouldn't discuss here) and secondly, if we are to avoid that person paying more, it means the cheaper fare is the only fare that will be retained. Now that sounds good, but it's going to mean a lot more subsidy, especially if fares for longer journeys also have to reduce (to avoid the need to split).
The train companies constantly blame each other for delays. It once took me 4 months to get delay repay for a 1.5 hour delay because the companies couldn't decide which one was responsible
If they had posted on the forum we could have probably given them an instant answer! But you could easily change the Delay Repay scheme without changing anything else to resolve this problem.
“I spent hours trying to work out a cheaper way to get from Newcastle to Derby.
That problem has already been solved by split ticketing sites; it takes no more time to book a cheaper ticket from a split ticket provider than it would take to buy an expensive ticket from XC.
As the train pulled out of the station, the train manager announced that Virgin tickets would not be accepted.
Again that could easily be solved; there is already a document that requires operators to accept each others tickets under certain circumstances. The remit could be amended accordingly. Some people have concerns though that some trains could not cope with an influx of passengers, but that problem would exist even if all trains were operated by the same company.
