Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what estimate his Department has made of the predicted total cost to the public purse of payments to the rolling stock leasing companies for (a) 2020, (b) 2021, (c) 2022 and (d) 2023.

The Office of Rail and Road publishes annual statistics on rail industry finances here:

https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/finance/rail-industry-finance/

These statistics show that total rolling stock costs paid by those operators under franchise contract with the Department for Transport were £2.534bn in 2019/20.

However, please note that:

During 2019/20 these costs were not borne directly by the public purse as the train operators were classified to the private sector in that year. They were reclassified to the public sector with effect from 1 April 2020, as a consequence of the emergency agreements introduced at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Rolling stock costs include not only unit rentals, but also a range of support services such as train maintenance and stabling, not all of which are provided by the lessor of the train fleet. No estimates are available for later years.