Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what criteria are used to establish whether delays over five minutes to a timetabled long distance train service are caused by (a) Network Rail, (b) the train operating company or (c) other factors; and what changes have been made to those criteria since January 2008.

The criteria for establishing delay causes are to be found in the Delay Attribution Guide, issued by the Delay Attribution Board – a joint rail industry body remitted to provide guidance to the industry on delay attribution issues.

The current guide was issued in April 2014. Copies of the all the guides since 2007 can be seen at:

http://www.delayattributionboard.co.uk/delayattributionguides.htm

The Department does not make estimates with regard to the attribution of delay in respect of the annual number of timetabled passenger train services that arrived, either within 5 minutes or not, of their scheduled arrival time.

The industry uses the Delay Attribution Guide to attribute delays by total minutes of delay, not by number of trains. The Office of Rail Regulation is beginning to publish such information; see

http://orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/13792/network-rail-monitor-2013-14-q4.pdf (page11) for the 2013-14 figures as to how industry delay was apportioned for each operator and nationally.