Trains: Punctuality

Lord Birt Excerpts

Monday 20th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I think that the noble Baroness will find that the public purse is recompensing that delay replay now. It is a good scheme to compensate people properly for significant delays, but the object, which I have been talking about in this Question, is to reduce the delays by better management of the railways. That is what is important here. It is not compensation that should count but running the railway properly.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, in the last year, just under 10% of British train journeys were either cancelled, truncated or arrived more than 10 minutes late. The prime causes identified were unavailability of crew or fleet and signal and points failures. Recently, my wife and I holidayed in Japan for almost three weeks, travelling on national, regional and local trains. Every single train, without exception, arrived to the very minute on time and delivered us to our destination to the very minute on time. Will we ever attain that level of reliability?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

Virtually the whole of the world, in countries that run railways, is incredulous that this country managed to separate the infrastructure from the operations for more than 30 years. That is the primary reason why people have spent so much time in the railways discussing not how you fix delays but whose fault it was and who pays the compensation for them. The Japanese railways are renowned for their reliability, but one thing that the Japanese have never done is to contemplate splitting the infrastructure from the operations. That is what Great British Railways will solve.