Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what recent assessment he has made of the value for money of current levels of service on each section of the (a) TransPennine Express and (b) Northern Rail franchises.

At a Direct Award or franchise Re-let we carry out value for money assessments (in order to calculate Benefit-Cost Ratios) of changes to service levels but we do not undertake this assessment of the existing base service levels where they carry forward into the new Agreement.

However, for any large procurement exercise such as a Direct Award or Franchise Re-let, we use externally produced comparators that cover the whole of the franchise to allow us to evaluate the price of any bid that we receive.