Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what remedial actions he may take in the event of a franchised train-operating company's force majeure claim for relief from benchmarked contractual payments being (a) not agreed and (b) agreed only in part by his Department.

Under the terms of their contracts, train operating companies actual performance is measured by excluding anything caused by a Force Majeure Event. Force Majeure Events are by their very nature incidents which are outside an operators’ direct control, such as major infrastructure failures that result in a line blockage.

Remedial actions are not specifically related to whether or not the Department accepts an operators force majeure claim but to whether an operator exceeds their Performance Benchmarks as set out in their respective contract.