The Rail Minister Lord Hendy has called for “a relentless concentration on performance” following London Northwestern and West Midlands Railway’s services joining the fast-growing family of operators owned by the public for the public.

From last Sunday, half of all rail journeys that Great British Railways (GBR) will ultimately be responsible for came under publicly-owned operators following the arrival of the latest operator.

The latest two bring the two sides of the West Midlands Trains (WMT) business under public ownership: London Northwestern, which operates services between Liverpool and Birmingham and along the West Coast Main Line to and from London Euston, and West Midlands Railway, which serves destinations across the West Midlands via Birmingham New Street and Birmingham Snow Hill.

“There’s two things that I want to see,” explained the Rail Minister. “Firstly a relentless concentration on performance, on driving revenue and reducing costs. Second, the benefits of the much closer working on integration which we’ve seen in various ways already at Southeastern, South Western Railway and Greater Anglia.

“They’ve both had some performance problems both in train staffing terms, in fleet terms and in infrastructure terms and what I want them to do is put aside the contractual stuff and sit down and work out how you just get better outcomes.”

WMT is the fourth operator to enter public ownership under the government’s Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act. It joins Greater Anglia, c2c, Northern, TransPennine Express, Southeastern, LNER and South Western Railway which are currently managed by Department For Transport Operator Limited (DFTO).

“There are still lessons to be learned because everyone of the transfers is different,” he said. “This year we have Govia Thameslink Railway to come in, but the thing I’m really pleased about is that I can see the people on the ground, the people managing this, leaning into this model. They like it.

“It is also good that the statistics show that the public ownership train operating companies are marginally beating the remaining private ownership train operators in terms of performance.”

Passengers in other parts of the country are already experiencing the benefits of public ownership. On average, publicly owned DfT train operators perform better on punctuality and cancellations than those yet to come under DfT ownership.

Publicly owned operator South Western Railway has also quadrupled the number of new trains in service since entering public ownership and passengers can now use tickets across publicly owned operators during cancellations – at no extra cost.

Meanwhile, Northern is planning for the future by introducing state-of-the-art simulators to accelerate driver training programmes and are planning their largest ever fleet investment, with up to 450 new trains.  

Reflecting on the success, Lord Hendy said: “Anglia was doing a good job before the handover and have been doing a good job since, and Southeasters is proving a good model with all sorts of ideas about trains and track inspections which are coming to fruition.

“South Western didn’t start from a good place, woefully short of drivers and 83 of the 90 Arterio fleet in sidings. Now there are a third of them in service and there’s a massive training programme in place. I wouldn’t say everything is rosy, but there’s a plan in place to fix issues.”

GTR services will be next to transfer on 31 May 2026, marking another significant step in the government’s plans to bring services into public ownership.

Chiltern Railways and Great Western Railways services are then expected to follow, with the Secretary of State for Transport due to make final decisions on when exactly this will happen in due course. The full public ownership programme is expected to be completed by the end of 2027.