Listening to our stakeholders

We hold stakeholder events, regular meetings and issue surveys to gather stakeholder feedback. This all helps us to understand stakeholder priorities and to gather feedback on what stakeholders think of what we’re doing. It also helps to shape our plans for the future - we welcome ideas from all our stakeholders.

Stakeholder conferences 2024

We held stakeholder conferences in January 2024 and we’d like to thank everyone who attended. Your contributions were extremely valuable.

Download Manchester event slides here

Download York event slides here

Stakeholder surveys

Our annual stakeholder survey received 85 responses and 75% of participants have had a relationship with Northern for at least six years. The feedback given by participants is very important to us and below we have summarised the main survey findings.

Strengths

Feedback through the survey indicates that levels of trust have remained healthy and that stakeholders overall think we are a transparent and professional organisation. The vast majority of stakeholders would recommend the Northern team to work with, as personal relationships remain highly regarded.

We will continue to communicate regularly with stakeholders, engaging and collaborating on a range of topics and issues.

Weaknesses

Stakeholders feel that operational performance and disruption are weaker areas for Northern, which is consistent with the feedback we received last year. This is an area that, as a business we continue to focus on, with a plan to further reduce sickness absence, along with a continued focus on driver training.

Stakeholder feedback also indicates that we are not engaging as effectively with stakeholders as we have been over the past couple of years and we are looking at how we can strengthen links, providing more opportunities to listen and act on stakeholder suggestions.   

Other findings

Station as a place and new rolling stock, followed by performance and social value are the subjects that stakeholders are most interested in hearing more about from Northern. 

Stakeholders’ perceptions of what the rail industry’s priorities should be for the future follow a very similar line of discussion as last year and focus largely on reliability of the base rail service, followed by a focus on passenger growth and collaborative working.

When considering what Northern’s role should be in supporting the economy and delivering wider social value across the region, stakeholders mention first and foremost the provision of a reliable and affordable rail service, then:
• Consideration of all relevant markets as equably as possible
• Collaboration and partnership working to gain investment
• Innovation and a longer-term outlook
 

Pulse survey

Thank you to all our stakeholders who completed the July stakeholder pulse survey. We were extremely pleased to receive almost 60 responses and we appreciate the time you’ve taken to give us your feedback. Through the survey we look to measure relationships, engagement and your trust in Northern as a company. We also seek feedback on the strength of our goals, our impact on the North and, importantly our performance. 

Overall stakeholder feedback tells us that personal relationships are strong with our regional teams – this is something we value highly and we will continue to strengthen. You gave good feedback on our engagement with stakeholders, although we recognize there is more we can do. We will to look for opportunities to meet with you and communicate more often, particularly around our performance improvement plans which we know is a key area of interest to you.

Through the comments you provided and your scores for reliability and trust, it’s clear that performance is still a significant concern and that you want to see improvements in reliability and punctuality. We recognize that performance is not where it should be and that this is having an ongoing impact on our customers. We’ll keep you updated on our plans over the coming months and please do keep in touch with your regional stakeholder managers if you’d like to know more about what’s going on locally.