Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how many incidences there were of station skipping on Southern Rail services in the last 18 months.

The Department for Transport does not keep information on the details of number of ‘station skipping’ incidents on the Southern network.

Omitting scheduled station stops (‘station skipping’) is used as part of a strategy known as ‘service recovery’, the intention being to restore the service to timetable as quickly as possible following a problem. Services which miss stations en route are counted as punctuality failures in the published statistics.

We expect the operator to make the correct operational decisions which balances the needs of passengers who are inconvenienced by taking stops out of service against the wider advantages to passengers to get services back on schedule as soon as possible.