Has TransPennine Express improved its train service?

Train company TransPennine Express (TPE) has been under scrutiny in recent months for poor performance.

Its contract covering routes across the North of England and Scotland is due to finish at the end of May, with a government decision due on whether it will be renewed.

BBC News analysed official figures from industry regulator, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), to examine how services have fared in the run up to the announcement.

TPE's services began to experience ongoing disruption in early 2022.

The company said it was affected by high staff sickness levels and the coronavirus pandemic delaying the training of new drivers.

This has been compounded by its lack of an agreement with unions for drivers to work voluntary overtime. The union ASLEF has accused the company of relying on this instead of recruiting enough staff.By December, TPE was one of three operators said by the government to be responsible for "unacceptable" services across the North of England.

Figures released on Friday showed TPE cancelled one in six (17%) of its services in March - the highest rate of any rail company, but an improvement on January and February, which saw about a third of services cancelled.

Most cancellations happened up to 22:00 the night before the service was scheduled due to a lack of staff, a practice known as "pre-cancelling" or "p-coding".

Figures on these additional cancellations have only been published since February, after the ORR asked train companies to provide the data to reflect the true impact on passengers. It means a full comparison with previous months is not available.

Whereas cancellation figures are published by the regulator every month, punctuality figures are published quarterly.

The timeliness of TPE trains improved slightly in the latest figures to February, after a sharp decline in September.

About half of services arrived late, a minute or more after the scheduled time. This was worse than the average for all operators of around 33%.

While figures suggest the company's current punctuality rates have improved on the period before the pandemic, they do not take into account the number of services have been reduced by around a third.

There was a similar trend in longer delays. In February 6% of trains arrived later than 15 minutes after the scheduled time, an improvement on December but still about triple the average for all operators.

In December, when there was disruption due to industrial action, TPE recorded the lowest number of trains planned in timetables since records began in 2016, at about 3,500.

In February and March the company planned to run about 6,500 trains. The March figure was similar to the number of services planned over the same period in 2022, but about a third (3,000) fewer than before the pandemic in 2020.

These figures only count the number of planned services, before on-the-day cancellations are made.

Including trains cancelled the previous day - which are removed from the official figures and do not count as being planned - at one point TPE timetabled about 7,700 trains in February.

Transport Minister Mark Harper said on Wednesday the current level of service had been "unacceptable", and if he thought TPE was not capable of improving, "no option is off the table".

He told the Transport Select Committee he had to make a decision that was "legally defensible" by examining all of the evidence about the service and the "capacity of the company to improve those services".

Government officials have also said they are working with operators on long term solutions, such as recruitment.

A number of options are available to the government - it could renew TPE's contract for eight years, grant a temporary extension, or to bring TPE under public control with the Operator of Last Resort (OLR).

The OLR, effectively a government-run train company, manages rail franchises that are brought into public ownership, with a view of eventually returning them to the private sector.

The Rail Minister Huw Merriman has also previously referenced the idea of merging TransPennine and Northern, which is already run by OLR.

Two other networks are also run in this way: LNER and Southeastern.

A spokesperson for the company said it had introduced a recovery plan at the beginning of February to reduce cancellations and improve reliability.

As a result, they said cancellations for any reason had fallen by 40% between mid-March and mid-April. The latest ORR figures only capture up to the end of March.

Additional reporting by Wesley Stephenson and Hope Bolger