The Focus is on punctuality

Passenger Focus is the independent consumer watchdog which, through its National Passenger Survey (NPS), provides a network-wide picture of passenger satisfaction with Britain’s rail services.

Overall, Passenger Focus’s NPS of more than 31,000 passengers reveals that overall satisfaction has been rising gradually over recent years – with 84% satisfied in Autumn 2010. For both the industry and government, the NPS results are a valuable tool which allows decision makers to pinpoint where there are problems, what services are working well and where funding needs to be directed.

However, in an effort for the survey to be more transparent and useful to both industry and passengers, Passenger Focus has, for the first time, published results by route. By doing this we can see that on the best routes almost every passenger is satisfied compared with only 72% on the lowest scoring.

Analysing the NPS in this way marks a huge step forward in transparency. Passengers can now get a much better idea of how their services compare to others run by their train company as well as those across Britain. We welcome the industry’s agreement and support in publishing the data this way but now is the time for industry to take forward this transparent approach in how it reports its own performance data.

The NPS shows that punctuality is the biggest driver of passenger satisfaction – the key to keeping passengers satisfied is to run punctual trains. Although the NPS reveals that 82% of Great Britain’s passengers are satisfied with punctuality, breaking the results down by a train company’s route shows that averages are also masking variations in passenger satisfaction. For the passenger frustrated by what they consider to be frequent delays on their line, the industry’s publication of global averages may feel like a recipe for having their concerns ignored. Look at Virgin Trains, for example, which runs long-distance services on Britain’s west coast. Our research shows that 89% of Virgin Trains’ passengers are satisfied with the punctuality/reliability of the train – a good result. On the other hand, looking at individual routes, only 82% of passengers are satisfied with punctuality and reliability on the London to Scotland route, compared with 92% on the London to Wolverhampton journey.

However, tighter geographical breakdowns are only part of the story. The industry’s published punctuality figure records the proportion of trains arriving at destination within five minutes of booked time, or 10 minutes for long-distance services. Passenger Focus has recently published new research into the relationship between passenger satisfaction and train lateness. With the help of train companies CrossCountry, National Express East Anglia and Northern Rail, we have analysed how passenger satisfaction with punctuality shifts when trains are late.

The findings reveal that commuter satisfaction with punctuality starts to drop as soon as a train is only one minute late and then drops by as much as five percentage points per minute of additional delay. Business and leisure passengers are a little more tolerant, being prepared to wait between four and six minutes before their satisfaction is affected. So while a passenger may record their train as late, industry statistics portray a more positive picture which doesn’t necessarily line up with passengers’ experience.

The study also found that passengers’ experience of delays tends to be more than that recorded by the industry. This is because trains may be late at stations along the route, but make up time towards the end of the journey and arrive at the final station according to the timetable. However, many passengers commuting home in the evening have got off the train long before it reaches its final destination ‘on-time’.

So the passenger experience of delay suggests a desire to understand whether trains arrive on time, rather than just within five or 10 minutes, and to understand what happens along the journey, not just at the final destination. The first issue is easier to solve – simply publish the right-time arrival statistics that are already produced and distributed widely within the industry. The second problem is harder to address and we feel that debate must begin to understand the most effective measure of punctuality at intermediate stops.

Our research shows that after value for money, punctuality continues to feature top of passengers’ priorities for improvement. At a time when ‘average’ performance continues to climb, it is time to explore where specific problems lie and make a step-change in the amount and quality of information revealed to passengers.