Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what steps he has taken to deliver more (a) timely and (b) generous compensation for passengers whose rail journeys have been disrupted.

The Department requires operators of new franchises to provide automated Delay Repay compensation processes that make claiming swift and simple and is working with the rail industry and the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) to deliver more automated claims processes across all DfT-let franchises.

Recent ORR research shows that 94.7% of passengers report that their compensation claims were resolved within the industry deadline of 20 working days. See https://orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/40838/delay-compensation-claims-factsheet-1819-Q3.pdf.

Delay Depay 30 is now available on all but one of the DfT franchises. Passengers on 50% of DfT-let franchises are now eligible for improved compensation schemes when their trains are delayed by 15 minutes or more (DR15). Due to the relatively large size of the franchises that now operate DR15, this means that 74% of journeys on DfT franchises now have DR15 available to them.

For passengers with single and return tickets, Delay Repay is more generous than the systems in place on most other Western European railways and considerably more generous than the minimum standard of compensation that is set by EU Regulation.