Complaints Review and Continuous Improvement Report

Overview of complaints closed in Rail Year 1 April 2025 - 31 March 2026

Top complaint driver by reason

Complaints handling improvements.

In Rail Year 2025–2026, Northern had 3,862 internal customer satisfaction surveys completed by customers who accessed our complaints handling process a 19% response rate. 

The customer effort score for Rail Year 2025–2026 increased by 3% to 61%, with more customers finding it easy to interact with Northern's complaint handling process, compared to Rail Year 2024–2025. This is a direct result of launching a new webchat service on our website. 

Complaints received across complaint handling categories increased slightly by 12 to 253, which equates to 1.3% of all complaints handled in Rail Year 2025-2026. When factoring in the increase of 8.5% in passenger journeys and the performance achieved based on Rail Year 2024-2025, this would equate to a 2% reduction. 

In May 2025, we launched the Northern Assisted Travel Support team. This team is available from 6am to 11pm, seven days a week, to offer support to customers who are travelling with us and require assistance. This team also proactively contacts customers when the booked assistance has been marked as incomplete in the passenger assistance system. As a result of these proactive contacts, we have assisted 108 customers in making a complaint. The customer effort score for these customers is significantly higher than the unit average at 84%, finding it easy to interact with our complaints handling process.  

As part of our complaints handling process, we also proactively signpost the additional support that can be provided if assistance to make a complaint is required in all our acknowledgement emails and on our website. These complaints are managed by a team of six dedicated customer relations supervisors. This year, 14 customers reached out to us for extra support through this process, and the customer effort score for these customers was significantly higher than the unit average, with 74% finding it easy to interact with our complaints handling procedure. 

Overall complaints across all categories increased in Rail Year 2025–2026 by 9%, though passenger footfall increased by 8.5% compared to Rail Year 2024–2025, and this was mainly driven by train service performance complaints, demonstrating that complaint volumes in relation to customer footfall remain consistent. 

Train Service Performance

We received 5,552 complaints in Rail Year 2025–2026, in relation to train service performance, a 5% reduction from Rail Year 2024–2025. This equates to a 13.5 % reduction overall when factoring in the increased passenger journeys.  

The delivery of our Performance Improvement Programme has seen punctuality and reliability metrics stabilise in Rail Year 25-26.

At the end of P12 2025-26, punctuality has improved for the first time in almost a decade, excluding the impact of two exceptional events: May 2018 and COVID. Cancellations were 3.52% down from 5.92% the previous year, demonstrating a considerable improvement year-on-year.

Whilst this improvement demonstrates that the programme is delivering the expected outcomes, it is recognised that more work needs to be done to drive further improvements and deliver the conductor reform required to enable an increase in Sunday services.

We have recently outlined our joint commitment to improving performance in the North by creating our Joint Performance Improvement Strategy, which has been endorsed by the Executive Leadership Team at Network Rail, Northern and TransPennine Express – this strategy is the first time the North of England has collectively stated their joint ambition to improve performance together.

Ticket and Refunds Policy

Key Insight – Penalty Fares

In Rail Year 2025–2026, we received 1,357 complaints in relation to ticketing and refunds policy, with the main complaint driver being Penalty Fares. This is a 12% reduction compared to Rail Year 2024–2025. However, when factoring in the increased passenger journeys, this is a 20% reduction on the previous year.

This year, we have seen the benefits of the training we delivered last year to all our revenue enforcement team. Prior to the training, we reviewed the current legislation in relation to penalty fares in conjunction with other DFTO operators to ensure consistency and alignment of process.

This work informed the revised training package delivered to our revenue enforcement team and included:

• Enhanced disability awareness training.
• Managing conflict and Customer service training.
• Re-clarified the correct process to follow in relation to the current legislation.
• Issued new guidance when dealing with Railcard issues and Off Peak / On Peak ticket issues.

This year and moving forward, we have introduced and delivered annual refresher training for all our revenue enforcement colleagues.

We are trialling a genuine mistake model in the East and North East regions following the ORR report and recommendations. This means in the first instance, where a customer may have made a mistake, they will be issued with a warning and provided an education card, and they will be permitted to purchase onboard. If the customer were to repeat this again, then a penalty fare will be issued. This has had a positive impact on customer experience, allowing for genuine errors and has contributed to the overall complaint reduction.

Helpfulness and attitude of staff on train and at the station

In Rail Year 2025-2026, we received 1,427 complaints in relation to the attitudes and helpfulness of staff at stations and onboard our services, a 1% reduction compared to Rail Year 2024-2025. When factoring in the increased passenger journeys this equates to a 9% reduction this year.

We continue to support our customers across our network. We ask our customers after travelling for their feedback, combined with our complaint data, and use this information to understand where we do well and where we need to improve.

We continue to share the information with our operational teams on a periodic basis and agree on improvement actions on key trends through our insight into the action programme led by our customer experience business partners.

We continue to share this information with our training department to support prioritisation of resources/scheduling to ensure staff in these areas are prioritised for customer service training.

We continue to deliver our customer service improvement program to our customer-facing colleagues, including enhanced disability awareness training. Key themes are also shared with operational colleagues during safety briefs. 

We have revised our customer service training for new colleagues in all customer-facing areas. This includes alignment with GBR customer service standards, including information during disruption. Our focus for this rail year is on our existing colleagues, improving our training content and creating customer service processes that support in driving informed and consistent customer interactions.

We continue to focus on key disruption management principles such as our 2,4,6,8 campaign, which aims to manage customer expectations and provide timely updates on board our trains.  We have also focused on providing our station teams with clear disruption guidelines at all our staffed stations, including how to support customers with alternative transport.

Delay Repay Compensation process

Rail Year 2025–2026 saw an increase of 7.5% in the number of claims received vs Rail Year 2024–2025.  75% of all claims received were approved and compensation provided compared to 76% in Rail Year 2024–2025.  This demonstrates an increased customer awareness of the Delay Repay scheme.

We saw an increase in Delay Repay complaints received in Rail Year 2025-2026 to 2,868 compared to 2,732 in Rail Year 2024–2025. When you factor in the increase of 7.5% to claim volumes, actual complaints reduced by 3.5% compared to the previous year. 

Further details on our delay repay improvements can be found on our website here. 

Safety and Security on board / Sufficient room for all passengers to sit and stand

Key insight – Crowding

In Rail Year 2025–2026, we received 2,622 complaints in relation to safety and security onboard and sufficient room for all passengers to sit and stand, a 55% increase in complaints compared to Rail Year 2024–2025 and a 46% increase when factoring in the additional customer journeys in Rail Year 2025-2026.

Our automated customer count data is used in our fleet planning to maximise the capacity we have, specifically during peak demand, as well as supporting special events in the regions. 

NTL also actively uses advanced purchase ticketing to manage customer demand, maximising pricing differential on advanced ticketing, encouraging customers to travel at quieter times to reduce crowding and utilise capacity on quieter services.

We experienced a higher number of trains than usual requiring maintenance, specifically with our new CAF fleet, which resulted in several trains having to be removed from the network for repairs. To protect the timetable, we had to stretch our legacy fleet of class 158’s, 156’s and 150’s across the network, and this has resulted in less capacity being available to us.  Our engineering team are actively working with our supply chain to ensure we can mitigate these issues in future.

The current Sunday timetable provision introduced in the North West to stabilise service whilst ongoing discussions take place around conductor terms and conditions means that the frequency of service provision is less than on a normal working day. Therefore, in some locations, there are larger time gaps between the frequency services, which contributes to overcrowding. This specifically impacted coastal locations such as the Cumbrian Coast and Blackpool, with more customers travelling with us for leisure purposes.  

Accessibility Improvements

Key Insight - Failed booked assistance, Mobility scooter policy

In Rail Year 2025–2026, we saw a 17% increase in pre-booked assisted travel journey complaints compared to Rail Year 2024–2025. We received 738 complaints across all accessibility categories, a 50% increase compared to Rail Year 2024–2025, when factoring in the increased journeys. 

303 of these complaints were a reported booked assistance failure across 87,669 booked assisted travel journeys provided, a failure rate of 0.0034%. This is a slight increase on rail year 2024–2025 and a direct result of launching the Northern Assisted Travel Support service, and the result of the proactive investigations into incomplete assistance they undertake, contacting every customer who has an incomplete assistance request from the previous day.

Our customer data allows us to view the information from customers who have identified themselves as disabled separately and subsequently produce a Disabled Customer CSAT score, which we monitor continuously.

We know from our complaints data that failure to deliver assistance as requested is a key focus area.

We have been working to improve this area with significant focus and resources across 2025 and 2026, including the planning and delivery of an Improvement Plan specifically focused on the reliability of passenger assistance.

One of the most significant aspects of this plan was the introduction of our Assisted Travel Support team, based in our Sheffield Customer Centre, with lived experience of disability and specific training to support disabled customers. 

This team contacts every customer each day who has a booked assistance request which shows as incomplete. We call or email every customer, and wherever a customer responds, we act based on their response. Many customers will have decided not to travel for their own reasons, but some will have experienced failed assistance, and we investigate each of these with the relevant team in Northern, taking necessary mitigating actions and responding to the customer. 

During 2026, we have also established a continuous improvement programme for assistance delivery, which utilises the large volume of data we now collate from our mystery shopping regime, post-travel surveys and complaints. Trending areas of assistance failure/dissatisfaction are presented to ops teams on our periodic working groups to embed accountability and allow us to identify, prioritise and deliver action to address root causes. 

Currently, our key areas of focus are:

• Increasing the use of the PA app amongst conductors and station colleagues
• Improving our assistance delivery at unstaffed stations
• Identifying methods to improve assistance delivery in disruption
• Targeting local issues (delivering tailored action plans at stations/lines of route where assistance is consistently failing)

Alongside these areas of focus, work continues to deliver our Disability Awareness Approach to Improvement plan to ensure that our passenger-facing colleagues are equipped with the knowledge required to excel at assistance.