Revenue forgone: train operating companies
Published 14 August 2024
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According to analysis produced by GBRTT, direct industry passenger revenue forgone from national strike days across rail trade unions has totalled around £850 million in nominal prices since industrial action commenced in June 2022.
This analysis is based on data for all mainline train operating companies (TOCs) operating passenger services in Great Britain.
Calculating revenue forgone
To calculate revenue forgone, the Great British Railways Transition Team (GBRTT) first estimated the revenue that TOCs would have expected to have received on each day affected by industrial action, had it been an ordinary undisrupted day. This is estimated using several dates in the weeks preceding the industrial action – where no industrial action occurred – and extracting data for the same weekday as the day of industrial action.
Average revenue is then calculated across these days and compared with the specific day when industrial action occurred to produce an estimate of revenue forgone. This calculation is combined with refund data to provide a total industrial action impact, aggregated from period 3, 2022, to period 4, 2024.
Passenger revenue includes all ticket revenue and miscellaneous charges associated with passenger travel on national railways.
Data used for this analysis
This analysis used data from Latest Earnings Networked Nationally Overnight settlement system (LENNON), an automated system based upon ticket sales. This holds information on the vast majority of national rail tickets purchased in Great Britain and is used to allocate the revenue from ticket sales between TOCs.
As an administrative source, it is not subject to sampling errors, however, assumptions are applied to adjust or distribute ticket sales for certain types of tickets such as season tickets. Work to adjust the use of split ticketing options, which may overstate the number of passenger journeys and may affect the scale of this revenue estimate, is currently in progress.
In addition to internal quality assurance undertaken by GBRTT, this analysis is tested against the Department for Transport’s estimates of strike impacts once produced. Typically, both figures are of comparable magnitude.
Further information
For more information, contact the rail stats team: rail.stats@dft.gov.uk.