Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, whether his Department monitors the number of trains services without an on-board supervisor on the Southern Rail franchise.

The Department does not monitor these figures as a matter of course. We do, however, hold recent figures for the proportion of Southern services that have run without an on-board supervisor since the role was introduced in January 2017. These figures demonstrate that the percentage of services running without an on-board supervisor is very low and is decreasing over time.

Southern are only able to run services without an on-board supervisor in exceptional circumstances. This reduces the disruption to passengers, as if a conductor was due to work on these services, but is then unavailable, then they would have had to be cancelled.