Among the passengers crushed into the corridors of commuter trains, the Department for Transport’s latest solution for rail overcrowding is unlikely to provoke spontaneous applause.

Officials have found a way of reducing the number of trains deemed to be overcrowded without requiring any passengers to get off and without adding a single seat.

They have achieved this by changing the definition of the “acceptable loading of passengers on trains”.

Under the old standard, used in the West Midlands and some other parts of the country, it was considered acceptable to have ten people standing for every hundred seats. The new national standard, which will apply to all routes, has tripled the acceptable number of standing passengers to 30 per 100 seats.

The department said that its loading standard assumed that each standing passenger would have 0.45 sq m of floor space: any less and the train would be officially overcrowded.

Centro, the public transport authority in the West Midlands, has complained to the National Audit Office (NAO) that the new definition would result in even worse conditions on trains in the region and encourage people to travel by car.

Despite being easier to meet, the revised standard is being breached on hundreds of trains each day. According to the DfT, the most overcrowded service is First Capital Connect’s 7.15am service from Cambridge to King’s Cross, which has 76 people standing for every 100 seats.

In a report published today, the NAO said that overcrowding would continue to get worse until the Government fulfilled its pledge, made 18 months ago, to introduce 1,300 extra carriages. To date, only 423 of the carriages have been ordered from manufacturers and none has been delivered.

The department said that it was unable to give details of when the carriages would arrive except to say that they should all be in place by 2014. It was also unable to say to which lines the carriages would be allocated.

Demand for rail travel has been outstripping the supply of extra capacity for the past decade. Passenger numbers have grown by 50 per cent and the amount of freight carried by trains has grown by 60 per cent. But the number of trains has risen by only about 20 per cent. The Government announced last year that it would in- crease capacity by 22.5 per cent in the seven years to 2014. Network Rail has said that this would be inadequate if passenger numbers continued to grow at the present rate of 7 per cent a year.

The NAO, which investigated the value for money of eight train franchises signed by the Government since 2005, said that they all faced “severe capacity pressures on a number of routes, with increasing levels of crowding on peak commuter services, notably to London”. It said that the train companies, encouraged by the Department for Transport, were increasingly opting for “airline-style pricing techniques” to deter passengers from travelling on the most crowded trains.

Virgin charges £215 for an open single in standard class from London to Warrington, but as little as £13 for passengers able to book several weeks in advance.

The NAO said that the Government’s approach of encouraging train companies to maximise income from passengers meant that fares would continue to rise above inflation. It concluded: “Most passengers can expect to pay higher regulated and unregulated fares in the future.”

Edward Leigh, chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, said: “The news that fares are likely to rise above inflation in these difficult times will infuriate many passengers who have no alternative but to travel day after day on packed trains.”

Theresa Villiers, the Shadow Transport Secretary, said: “Excessive government micromanagement of our railways is delaying the delivery of vitally needed capacity enhancements, which means passengers suffer.”

Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat transport spokesman, said: “People are being forced off the trains and into their cars by unacceptable ticket prices.”

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