Rail operators ordered to halve cancellations by 2028 under first Great British Railways targets

Train operators across Britain have been told to cut cancellations in half by the end of 2028 under the first performance targets set by Great British Railways, the public body that now oversees most of the network.

The targets, published on Thursday, require every operator to bring cancellations below 2% of scheduled services within two years, down from a national average of 3.9% in the year to September. Operators will also be measured on punctuality, with 85% of trains expected to arrive within three minutes of time, and on how quickly disruption is cleared after an incident.

GBR will publish a monthly league table and has the power to replace the senior management of any operator that misses its targets for two consecutive quarters. Seven of the 14 operators now in public ownership were above the 2% threshold last year, with the worst, a northern commuter network, cancelling 6.1% of its services.

A senior GBR official said the regime was designed to end “the blame game between track and train” that had characterised the privatised era. “Nobody is going to be able to say it was the other side’s fault any more,” the official said. “There is one organisation, one timetable and one set of numbers, and we will publish them.”

The targets do not come with extra money. Operators will be expected to meet them within existing budgets, largely by cutting the number of trains cancelled because of staff shortages, which accounted for 41% of cancellations last year. GBR said it expected every operator to have enough drivers to run its timetable without relying on overtime by the end of 2027, a commitment that some in the industry regard as ambitious.

Dr Hannah Birtwistle, a rail economist at the University of Leeds, said: “The targets are sensible, but the driver training pipeline is three years long and some operators have only just started. If GBR is serious about 2028, it needs to be recruiting now, and that costs money it has not yet been given.”

Passenger groups welcomed the publication. Transport Focus, the watchdog, said that cancellations had been “the single biggest source of anger” in its surveys for four years. On the platform at York on Thursday morning, Ruth Appleyard, a civil servant who commutes to Leeds, said she had stopped relying on the first train of the day. “I leave half an hour early because there is a decent chance the 7.12 will not exist,” she said. “If this changes that, fine. I will believe it when I see it.”

The targets will apply to the three remaining privately operated contracts when they transfer to public ownership next year. GBR said the first league table would be published in December.