Rail passengers lost a staggering 3.6m hours to delayed trains in a year, new figures show

Rail passengers lost millions of hours to delayed trains in a year, Which? research revealed
Jeremy Selwyn

Rail passengers lost at least 3.6 million hours to delayed trains in a year, new research shows.

Delays of at least half an hour affected 7.2 million passenger journeys in Britain between March last year and April 2017, consumer group Which? said.

It found Virgin Trains East Coast was the train company with the highest proportion of significant delays, with 3.7 per cent of its services running between 30 minutes and two hours late.

This was followed by Virgin Trains West Coast (2 per cent) and CrossCountry (1.1 per cent).

The best performance was by c2c at just 0.2 per cent, according to the analysis of Office of Rail and Road (ORR) data from April 2016 to March 2017.

The research was released ahead of the 3.4 per cent average fare increase on Tuesday.

Passengers queue for a reduced Gatwick Express service during the Southern railway strike
Neil Hall/Reuters

A separate poll of 8,200 UK adults by Which? found two in five (40 per cent) commuters claim they were not told of their rights to compensation the last time they were entitled to a pay-out.

This rose to over half (54 per cent) of leisure passengers.

Which? managing director of public markets Alex Hayman said delays suffered by passengers are "even more infuriating" when they struggle to claim compensation.

He added: "The progress to date is simply not good enough.

"If train companies can't simplify unnecessarily complex claims systems for delayed customers, then government must press for automatic compensation to be introduced across the industry so that people can get the money they are owed."

Commuters arrive at London Victoria station
Getty Images

Paul Plummer, chief executive of the Rail Delivery Group, representing train operators and Network Rail, said: "Rail companies are working together to ensure more people arrive on time but when things go wrong it should be easy to claim any compensation due.

"As part of the industry's long-term plan to improve, more operators are introducing automatic refunds and, in the last five years, the amount of compensation paid out has increased five-fold to £45 million a year."

The ORR said it is expanding its monitoring of delay compensation to better understand the volume of claims for each firm and how quickly they are processed.

A Virgin Trains spokesman said: "Clearly, it's harder to run trains exactly to time over a 400-mile route, and around 80% of delays are outside of our control.

"But we always want to do the best for our passengers which is why we make claiming for delays as easy as possible and introduced industry-leading automatic compensation on our West Coast route."

Shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald said: "This research shows that private rail companies are failing to provide reliable services and the Government is refusing to hold them to account.

"Our railway is fragmented and the claims system is unnecessarily complex, meaning passengers are missing out on the compensation they are owed.

"The Tories have had years to improve and simplify the compensation process but instead they are defending private train companies, rather than standing up for passengers.

"This is yet more evidence that privatised rail is broken, which is why Labour will take our railway back into public ownership to be run for passengers, not profit."

A Department for Transport spokesman said: "The Government is investing in the biggest rail modernisation programme since Victorian times to deliver significant improvements that passengers want - more space and faster, more frequent services.

"Last year, we introduced a compensation scheme to allow passengers to claim cash back when held up for 15 minutes or more which is being rolled out across the country.

"We have told train companies to set out clearly what is on offer for passengers to make claiming compensation as easy, simple and swift as possible when things unfortunately do go wrong."

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in