Train company TransPennine Express (TPE) has come under scrutiny in recent months for poor performance.
The contract for routes across northern England and Scotland is due to expire at the end of May, with a Government decision due on whether to extend it.
BBC News analyzed official figures from industry regulator Office of Rail and Road (ORR) to examine how the services were performing in the run-up to the announcement.
In early 2022, TPE’s services experienced ongoing disruptions.
The company said it was hit by high levels of employee sickness and the coronavirus pandemic, which was delaying the training of new drivers.
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In addition, there is no agreement with the unions that drivers voluntarily work overtime. The ASLEF union has accused the company of relying on it instead of recruiting enough staff. By December, TPE was one of three operators accused by the government of being responsible for “unacceptable” service in the north of England.
Figures released on Friday showed TPE canceled one in six (17%) of its services in March – the highest rate of any rail company but an improvement from January and February, when about a third of services were cancelled.
Most cancellations were made by 10:00 p.m. the night before the scheduled service due to staff shortages, a practice known as “pre-cancellation” or “P-coding”.
The primary purpose of advance cancellations is to adjust emergency schedules when bad weather or infrastructure damage requires unexpected changes.
Figures on these additional cancellations have only been released since February, after the ORR asked rail companies to provide the data to reflect the real impact on passengers. This means that a full comparison with previous months is not available.
While the cancellation figures are published every month by the regulator, the punctuality figures are published quarterly.
The punctuality of TPE trains improved slightly in the latest figures up to February, after a sharp drop in September.
About half of the services were late, a minute or more after the scheduled time. This was worse than the average of around 33% for all operators.
While the numbers suggest the company’s current on-time performance rates have improved from pre-pandemic levels, they don’t take into account that the number of services has been reduced by about a third.
There was a similar trend for longer delays. In February, 6% of trains arrived more than 15 minutes after the scheduled time, an improvement on December but still around three times the average for all operators.
In December, when work was disrupted, TPE recorded the lowest number of scheduled trains since records began in 2016, at around 3,500.
In February and March, the company planned to run around 6,500 trains. The March number was similar to the number of services planned for the same period in 2022, but about a third (3,000) fewer than before the 2020 pandemic.
These numbers only count the number of scheduled services before daily cancellations are made.
Including the trains that were canceled the day before, which are excluded from the official figures and are not considered as planned, TPE temporarily canceled around 7,700 trains in February.
Transport Secretary Mark Harper said on Wednesday the current level of service had been “unacceptable” and if he felt TPE was unable to improve then “there was not an option off the table”.
He told the Transport Select Committee he had to make a decision that was “legally defensible” by reviewing all the evidence about the service and the “company’s ability to improve those services.”
Government officials have also said they are working with operators on long-term solutions like recruitment.
The government has a number of options – it could extend TPE’s contract by eight years, grant a temporary extension, or bring TPE under public control with the Operator of Last Resort (OLR).
The OLR, effectively a state-run railway company, manages railway concessions that are being transferred to public ownership with the intention of eventually returning them to the private sector.
Railway Minister Huw Merriman has also previously touted the idea of merging TransPennine and Northern, which are already operated by OLR.
Two other networks are also operated in this way: LNER and Southeastern.
A spokesman for the company said it introduced a recovery plan in early February to reduce cancellations and improve reliability.
As a result, cancellations for whatever reason dropped by 40% between mid-March and mid-April. The latest ORR figures only cover until the end of March.
Additional reporting by Wesley Stephenson and Hope Bolger
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