Office of Rail and Road January 2025 newsletter

Hello and welcome to the January newsletter

Welcome to 2025. As I reflect on the year just gone, I’m very pleased with what the Office of Rail & Road and industry achieved together in 2024.

As a regulator, we don’t chase headlines or popularity. Our priority remains delivering the best results for rail and road users in the most efficient way for taxpayers, without jeopardising health and safety requirements.

This means being ready to take tough decisions, but our starting point is to collaborate across the rail and road industries to achieve the outcomes users and funders need.

Here are some key examples from 2024:

Working with industry and unions we developed new rail staff fatigue guidelines, reinforcing our commitment to safety through coordination. While we prioritise collaboration, we took legal action on health and safety breaches where required.  We also did significant work on our study of the costs and benefits of safety regulation, to be published later this year.

We decided that delays on Network Rail’s Wales and Western region were unacceptable, and then asked Network Rail and the train companies to work together to examine root causes and identify improvements. Following a productive roundtable, we worked with Network Rail on a comprehensive performance improvement plan. Their engagement and constructive action meant we could withdraw our warning of a significant fine, keeping valuable resources within the industry.

Our consumer team challenged Northern Trains’ poor delivery of assistance for disabled passengers, but then worked collaboratively with them on a plan for measurable improvements. We also launched proposals for new passenger assistance ratings and called for operators to enhance the management of help points at stations.

On roads, we have worked closely with National Highways and the Department for Transport to address the delays in decision making in the run up to the election; changes made by the new Government and the decision to have a one year interim roads settlement in 2025-26 with the approach to the third Road Investment Strategy being set out in this year’s spending review.

The successful start of Network Rail’s new Control Period 7 (CP7) marked an important milestone for taxpayer value. Having achievable, costed, delivery plans provides crucial certainty for both rail users and our supply chain partners. Today we have also issued our Final Determination for High Speed 1’s next five-year settlement, with cost reductions for train operators.

Looking forward, 2025 is likely to bring new legislation from Government on setting up Great British Railways, which will be both a challenge and an opportunity. ORR is committed to working with Government on the emerging changes, providing regulatory oversight, expert advice, and continuing to facilitate industry-wide coordination. We will also look for opportunities to simplify how the industry works ahead of legislation.

Despite these likely changes, our main focus remains on the day job: delivering consistent and timely decisions across all areas, including on station authorisations, access applications and health and safety assurance.

I look forward to working with you throughout 2025.

John Larkinson
CEO

Top stories

Views sought : Penalty Fares

As part of our independent review of train operators’ revenue protection practices, including the use of penalty fares and prosecutions, we have launched a call for evidence for passengers who have been penalised for boarding a train without a valid ticket, or told their ticket is invalid. The consultation closes on 17th January. Please share this with your networks so as many people as possible get the chance to respond

We have ordered HS1 Ltd to further lower charges for train operators

We have announced today that we are directing HS1 Ltd to lower its charges for passenger and freight train operating companies to use the high speed rail line from London to the Channel Tunnel, from April 2025.  Our decision, published today in our Final Determination of HS1 Ltd’s spending plans for the next five years, follows a thorough review of the company’s proposals, which had already proposed some reductions in costs relative to today. Read our media release.

Views sought : how train companies give assistance to disabled passengers

2024 was a busy year for our work on passenger assistance and equally so in December. We were pleased to accept Northern’s plan to improve passenger assistance, following constructive working with them, including a fruitful roundtable with other key stakeholders. At the end of January, ORR will carry out a full review of the progress made and we shall repeat this at the end of April.

More widely, we are now consulting on a new annual assessment for launch in 2025 that will rate performance on how train companies provide assistance to disabled passengers. This new assessment, which will include Network Rail’s own performance in delivering passenger assistance, will strengthen the regulator’s ability to hold operators to account when things go wrong.

It will also highlight good practice to share across the industry, and drive improvements in providing good service for passengers.

The consultation closes on 14th February.

New reporting on rail replacement buses

In 2023 ORR issued a report which highlighted gaps in information for passengers using replacement vehicles either when planning or making actual journeys .  We called on the industry to take action as a result.

At the end of 2024 we issued an update on this, which found there had been positive new initiatives; for example on development of real time tracking, but there had been little improvement in the information actually provided on the rail replacement journey itself.

As a result of this most recent report we have set out further recommendations to industry to build on the progress made, and we will convene a meeting of the parties shortly to discuss the key findings and recommendations from this report.

Highways team visit National Highways’ Regional Operations Centre

Towards the end of last year, members of the ORR Highways team, accompanied by two of our non-executive directors, visited National Highways’ regional operations centre (ROC) at Newton-Le-Willows, near Warrington. The team wanted to see first-hand the work of ROC staff in dealing with incidents on the strategic road network (SRN), and to discuss National Highways’ progress on its commitment to build more emergency areas and improve the performance and availability of safety systems on smart motorways.

This visit formed part of the Highways team’s work to gather information that will feed into our annual assessment of safety performance on the SRN that is due to be published in March 2025.

National Highways staff also provided a guided tour of the enhancement scheme on the adjacent M6 between junctions 21a to 26. This is the final smart motorway scheme to be completed, and it fully opened to traffic on 19 December.

Blog

Will Godfrey, ORR’s Director of Economics, Finance and Markets, has published a blog on Benchmarking Network Rail’s costs which explains how we develop our understanding of the actual costs Network Rail face, which helps to inform our economic regulation.

Lucy Charlton, ORR’s senior statistical analyst, has produced a blog on Expanding ORR’s Environmental Data, looking at annual energy use and estimated emissions for passenger and freight trains in Great Britain.

Statistics

In December we published the following statistics:

• Rail Statistics Compendium – Annual (2023-24)
• Passenger Rail Usage – Quarterly (July-September 2024)
• Freight Rail Usage – Quarterly (July-September 2024)
• Passenger Rail Performance – Quarterly (July-September 2024)