Great Northern responds to spring 2016 satisfaction survey

Responding to the latest National Rail Passenger Survey by Transport Focus, in which Great Northern passenger satisfaction for the period 11 January to 20 March fell, year-on-year, from 80% to 74%, Passenger Service Director Keith Jipps said:

“We are determined to improve the overall service to our passengers on the Great Northern route. I continue to be impressed with our teams and their improved scores around helpfulness of staff but we know we can achieve significant improvements in customer satisfaction through our two year transformational programme to invest in new trains, more drivers, customer service standards as well as station enhancements across the network.

"This culminates in increased Moorgate train frequency and capacity, and a new timetable that links the Great Northern route with Thameslink providing direct or easier access to London stations such as Farringdon, linking to Crossrail, London Blackfriars and London Bridge as well as places like Gatwick Airport and Brighton.”

Network Rail’s area director Steve Hughes, said:

“Our job is to provide Great Northern with reliable infrastructure so they can run the best service possible. We are investing millions of pounds to improve services in the future through our Railway Upgrade Plan and work hard to minimise the disruption caused by this work.

"We have faced some challenges with our trackside equipment and continue to work to predict and prevent faults wherever possible. We are also working with British Transport Police, Great Northern and other partners to reduce the impact of external events which have impacted Great Northern Passengers such as lineside fires, railway crime and fatalities.”

For background:

These disappointing scores reflect the poor punctuality and disruption on the route, caused by driver vacancies at a time of added driver training for new and better trains, ageing rolling stock, major projects under way and issues with Network Rail infrastructure. But we’re bringing in new drivers as fast as we can and the new trains coming online this year and next will transform our passengers’ journeys.

Our train fleet is moving from being one of the oldest in the UK to one of the youngest. From September we will begin to replace the 28 and 35-year-old trains with new Class 387 trains, that are air conditioned, great for people with disabilities, more reliable and faster and with automated audio and visual information systems. Next year new Thameslink Class 700 trains will follow suit, replacing over half of our 21 year old trains. Then, in 2018, we will replace the whole train fleet on the Moorgate line, creating much greater capacity and modern day features. The same year will give main line passengers direct journeys onto the Thameslink route and increased service frequency and capacity.

In the meantime we are putting our trains through a heavy maintenance regime to ensure that the existing trains operate as reliably as they can until they are replaced. We have already undertaken these works on our class 365 trains, which also included an internal refresh of the seating, carpets and panelling as well as a number of other modifications and as a result the reliability of these trains has improved by around 20%.

We continue to work with Network Rail to improve the power, signalling and track that our services operate over. The service is now improving as Network Rail improves track and points reliability and replaces important cabling to electrical equipment.

Passenger information continues to be highly important to passengers. It’s disappointing we have not improved our scores around on-board information, as our train drivers are frequently praised for their announcements. We will do this by improving the flow of information to drivers so they can pass this on to their passengers. Our new trains also have much better on-board information systems.

Since Govia Thameslink Railway took over Great Northern, we’ve brought in more than 50 new drivers and have 90 more are in training. However, this isn’t a quick fix as we need to take drivers off duty to be trained in using the new depot at Hornsey and to drive the new trains we’re bringing in for passengers.