Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how many incidents of train delay were attributed to vegetation on each Network Rail Region in (a) 2019 and (b) 2020 to date.

The Office for Rail and Road (ORR) publish summary statistics on the number of delay minutes and their causes. These statistics can be found here:

https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/performance/passenger-rail-performance/table-3184-delay-minutes-by-operator-and-cause-periodic/

The following data produced by ORR shows the number of incidents on the railway attributed to vegetation management failure in 2019 and 2020 (to date) by Network Rail Region:

*This data is aggregated from data for (4-weekly) railway periods and therefore does not align precisely with calendar years. 2019 data represents the time period from 06/01/2019 to 04/01/2020. 2020 data is from 05/01/2020 to 12/10/2020 (railway period 7, latest data available).

Source: Network Rail data