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 2025

Thank you to everyone who attended our November 2025 stakeholder conference events. Please find the presentation materials below:

Liverpool conference slides

York conference slides

Accessibility workshop

Our fleet workshop

If you would like a copy of these presentations in a different format, please email: [email protected] 

Stakeholder surveys

Our annual stakeholder survey took place over November - January 2025. We received 78 responses and 79% 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 over the past year Northern has been good at communicating, engaging and maintaining stakeholder relationships. Personal relationships is an area where we score highly – satisfaction is in the high 80% range. Community rail and community work is also an area highlighted as a strength this year, with stakeholders appreciating the positive action Northern takes to support community activity. Stakeholders have also appreciated the visibility and honesty from our leadership team during a period when certain areas have experienced ongoing performance challenges.

Weaknesses

As with last year’s survey, stakeholders tell us that operational performance and disruption are weaker areas. Poor performance has cast a shadow over many of this year’s reputation scores with stakeholders making reference to cancelled trains eroding trust with customers.

This is an area that, as a business we continue to focus on, with both a short-term cancellations remedial plan, and a longer-term Performance Improvement Programme. We updated stakeholders on the plan at our stakeholder conference in January and you can view the slides via the links at the top of this page.

Other findings

This year we asked stakeholders what they think of our communications channels, such as our conference, forums and newsletters.

The most used form is our annual stakeholder conference, followed by our community conference. Newsletters and emails are also used significantly by our stakeholders, with more than 90% of responders saying they access them. Of all the different channels, our website and social media were viewed as least useful. We’ll be doing some work over the following year to see how we can improve how we use these channels for stakeholder communication, and we’d welcome your thoughts and feedback.

Going forward, stakeholder perceptions of what Northern’s immediate priorities should be focused significantly on operational performance. We acknowledge this feedback and we’ll provide updates over the coming year on our Performance Improvement Programme. Secondly stakeholders have told us that we should focus on building customer confidence, passenger trust and growing demand. This is another area we’re working on through our commercial and marketing team and communications campaigns and we’ll update our stakeholders over the year ahead. 

Stakeholder – pulse survey – September 2025

Thank you to everyone who filled out our most recent stakeholder pulse survey which ran 8 -24 September. We had 34 responses - a 20% response rate. The survey helps us to measure the strength of relationships, engagement and trust between Northern and our stakeholders. 

Overall, the scores have all held up well. The stakeholder engagement key metric was 84% against a target of 85%. The personal relationship score was 91% and several of the comments support this high score. While a few comments refer to the positive stabilisation of services, there were a couple of concerns raised around Northern not providing timely responses to stakeholder queries, which we are looking into. 

If you would like to know more about this survey please contact Claire Glavina [email protected]