Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what estimate he has made of the number of UK domestic passenger journeys made by air in 2019-20 that would have taken less than two and half hours to complete by train.
UK domestic air routes with more than 1,000 passengers in 2019 that are within a two-and-a-half-hour range by train, as well as the number of passenger journeys on these routes in 2019, are presented in the table below.
Departure airport | Arrival airport | Domestic passengers |
Heathrow | Manchester | 283,063 |
Manchester | Heathrow | 270,044 |
Heathrow | Leeds Bradford | 50,930 |
Leeds Bradford | Heathrow | 48,953 |
Exeter | London City | 17,307 |
London City | Exeter | 15,007 |
Manchester | London City | 1,862 |
London City | Manchester | 1,325 |
The Department holds data on passenger numbers on a direct basis only. Rail journey times on routes between these cities can be variable between services and train operators, so some services could take longer than the indicative two-and-a-half-hour threshold used here.
Data on passenger movements on all UK domestic routes for 2019 are published by the Civil Aviation Authority on their website in table 12.2.