Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Vere of Norbiton on 16 March (HL2045), on what evidence the claim is made that splitting the Norwich-Liverpool rail services at Nottingham will improve reliability.

Recent cross industry work on performance in the North West looked at the impact on Manchester’s Castlefield Corridor of trains heading to Manchester from Sheffield and found that “while the Norwich and Cleethorpes services generally depart their origin on time, by the time they depart Sheffield around 30% of trains are more than 5 minutes late”.

This confirms that the Norwich to Liverpool services lose time crossing the different congested corridors and key stations along its route. As a result, the trains then transmit further delay to the rest of the network. Industry data from the second half of 2019 on which individual trains cause the most delays to other trains, show that three of the worst eight trains on the whole GB network for transmitting delay are in this service group.

Therefore, both Network Rail and East Midlands Railway are firmly of the view that splitting these services at Nottingham will not only improve the performance of the respective halves of the split service, but also the performance of many other trains across the country.