Railways: Standards

(asked on 23rd July 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what proportion of services leaving each railway station were (a) cancelled or significantly late and (b) met the public performance measure in each of the last five years.


Answered by
Grant Shapps Portrait
Grant Shapps
Secretary of State for Defence
This question was answered on 31st July 2019

We recognise performance on the railway has been unsatisfactory, and passengers have not always received the level of service they expected. While performance has improved recently, the new Transport Secretary understands passengers need the certainty of reliable journeys, and is determined to work with industry to improve performance.

Official statistics on passenger rail reliability and performance are published by the Office of Rail and Road (ORR).

Cancellations and Significant Lateness (CaSL) measures the proportion of trains arriving at the final destination more than 30 minutes after the planned timetable or is cancelled either in full or in part.

The Public Performance Measure (PPM) is defined as the percentage of trains arriving at the final destination within five minutes of the planned timetable for London and South East, Regional and Scotland operators, or within ten minutes for the Long Distance operators.

Both PPM and CaSL measures reflect punctuality and reliability at the final destination, rather than at each station stop. For ease of reference, the national PPM and CaSL scores for the last 5 years are included in the table below.

Table 1 – National PPM and CaSL, 2014-15 to 2018-19

2014-15

2015-16

2016-17

2017-18

2018-19

PPM

89.7%

89.1%

87.7%

87.8%

86.3%

CaSL

2.8%

3.1%

3.8%

3.9%

4.3%

Source: ORR

The latest PPM and CaSL statistics can be found on the ORR website at the below link:

https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/performance/passenger-and-freight-rail-performance/

Since April 2019, the industry has adopted a new set of standard measures for measuring train performance including punctuality at each recorded station stop. The latest statistics are available from the below link:

https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/performance/passenger-and-freight-rail-performance/train-punctuality-at-recorded-station-stops-by-toc-table-365/

Further performance statistics for specific stations are held by Network Rail. We advise you contact them directly for further information.

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