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

We held stakeholder conferences in January 2025 and we’d like to thank everyone who attended. Your contributions were extremely valuable.

Download York event slides here

Download accessible York slides here

Download Manchester event slides here

Download accessible Manchester slides here

Download a copy of our new trains question and answer sheet

If you need any further assistance with slides, or would like a copy of slides from the workshops, please contact [email protected] 

Stakeholder surveys

Our annual stakeholder survey 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 – June 2025

Thank you to everyone who filled out our most recent stakeholder pulse survey - we received 31 responses. The survey helps us to measure the strength of relationships, engagement and trust between Northern and our stakeholders. We also seek feedback on our social impact as well as our performance.

The most recent results from June  2025 revealed that our stakeholders were happy with our engagement, with several comments from stakeholders who commented that the team are helpful, informative and open when dealing with them. When asked how well Northern engages with stakeholders, the response was 84%, an improvement from the 81% recorded at the previous survey in March. Other metrics either remained steady or saw improvements compared to the last survey, including the question on our train performance which improved from 55% - 64%. While the performance score improved, concerns were raised by some stakeholders around performance issues with certain routes (particularly those in the North West) and the reliability of Northern's ageing diesel trains.

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