Britain’s worst performing rail services revealed as 900 trains cancelled every day

Britain’s struggling railways are finally showing signs of improvement – although train companies are still cancelling more than 900 services per day, The i Paper can reveal.

More than 352,000 trains were part-cancelled or fully cancelled in the year between April 2025 and 2026, according to figures published by the Office for Rail and Road (ORR).

This equates to 4.6 per cent of services and is a slight improvement compared with 384,000 cancellations (5.1 per cent of all services) the year before. It means that 14 of the country’s biggest train companies have reduced cancellations in the past twelve months, including eight of the 10 now under public ownership.

New EU border checks should be suspended before peak summer, aviation industry leaders have said, after Brits reported huge delays due to the new Entry/Exit System (EES). 

The system, rolled out fully in April, involves people from the UK having their fingerprints registered and photographs taken to enter certain countries.

The EES is used to enter the Schengen Area, which consists of 29 European countries, mainly in the EU.

For most UK travellers, the process is done at foreign airports.

Severe operational consequences disrupting passengers and putting border authorities, airports and airlines under unsustainable pressure.

Senior figures at three major aviation industry bodies wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission warning waiting times at border control had “increased significantly, now reaching up to five hours”.

Since it’s implementation, the EES has caused travel chaos for Brits.

Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with missiles and drones, killing at least 13 people and injuring dozens more.

Russia launched a series of strikes on Kyiv, hitting residential ⁠buildings and ⁠triggering ​a fire in a hotel on a central boulevard.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko has said 13 people had been killed, ⁠with about three dozen locations across the city damaged in the attacks.

Many residents took shelter at metro stations after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued the first warnings of the attack.

Zelenskyy was forced to cut short a trip to Dublin on Wednesday, citing intelligence reports of a large-scale Russian attack.

Ukraine said on Tuesday it hit one of Russia’s largest satellite communication centers in north Moscow for the second time in just over a week.

Russian president Vladimir Putin also recently admitted Russia is facing fuel shortages after Ukraine launched repeated strikes on oil refineries, while Kyiv notably launched a large-scale attack on Moscow last month.

Sir Keir Starmer’s much-delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.

American company Anduril makes the “Seabed Sentry“- a weighted cylinder that uses sensors and AI to monitor what is happening under the sea. They could be used to listen out for spying and sabotage by Russian submarines. They are far cheaper than crewed submarines using traditional sonar.

A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.

The UK is woefully unprepared with the Royal Navy in a desperate condition. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.

Officials have drawn up contingency plans to cut further green levies from energy bills if prices remain high this winter, The i Paper has been told.

Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.

Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.

One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.

Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.

A written statement published by the Chancellor said the remaining sum would be “confirmed at Budget 2026, in a fair and balanced way”.

The coronation of Andy Burnham is fraught with dangers. Never will a prime minister have arrived in Downing Street with so little scrutiny of what he wants to do.

Electric flying taxis could be above the streets of London by 2028, a manufacturer has claimed. Here’s what you need to know.

Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.

All train companies are due to come under the control of the Department for Transport as their contracts expire and the Government nationalises the industry under the banner of Great British Railways.

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander told The i Paper it was “great to see” that services are improving “across the majority of publicly-owned train operators”, but she admitted there is more to do.

“We are determined to build on this momentum as we set up Great British Railways, creating a simpler, more dependable network that puts passengers and customers first,” Alexander said.

“We know there is still further to go, and I will continue to keep up the pace to deliver the reliable railway passengers rightly expect.”

The most improved performer in the past year was Northern, which has cut cancellations from just under 7 per cent of services to 4.5 per cent.

The operator runs around 2,500 trains per day across towns and cities including Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle.

Northern has been under government control since 2020 when the franchise was stripped from former private transport firm Arriva due to poor performance.

But in the four years that followed, cancellations soared, in large part due to industrial disputes.

The company frequently came under fire from Andy Burnham in his time as Mayor of Greater Manchester, who blamed “poor” and “aggressive” management in an interview with The i Paper last year.

Burnham, who is now widely expected to become Labour’s new prime minister, has backed rail nationalisation and is expected to continue with plans for Great British Railways.

It has also been rumoured Burnham wants to look at further devolving powers to regional mayors, which would allow them to have more control over the rail network in their area.

Warrick Dent, the recently-appointed Chief Operating Officer at Northern, said improvements in the last year have come in part because of a new reduced timetable, which has meant fewer services running on Sundays, but also fewer cancellations.

“A big chunk of what has been achieved has been through the introduction of a temporary timetable, on a Sunday which has really helped us stabilise,” he said.

Northern has also reorganised its management so that it now has six “directors of service delivery” which replicate the existing mayoral combined authorities in their patch; Liverpool, Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, North Yorkshire and the North East.

Previously, only three regional directors were responsible for much larger geographical areas.

Dent said the shake-up provides more local accountability and has allowed the directors to focus solely on improving performance.

“That’s really where GBR [Great British Railway] will look and feel very different for the rail industry, it will have much closer regional alignment with the mayors and as that goes through we certainly believe we are in a strong place with relationships with levels of trust and transparency,” he added.

Dent also credited nationalisation with allowing Northern and other train operators to move away from a “blame” game on causes of cancellations and provide more long-term financial certainty.

Critics have suggested the industrial disputes which have plagued the railways are unlikely to disappear under nationalisation.

Dent said at Northern he feels the trade unions are “supportive” of Great British Railways and that it will allow “inconsistencies” between train companies to be standardised.

But he admitted: “I think it’s fair to say it is a period of change, so we are on a journey with the trade unions, we need them to come on that journey with us and be prepared to acknowledge that the industry is going to change and get better as a result.

“What we need to be is open and honest and say it how it is. I’m not saying there won’t be bumps in the road, I think there will be, but we have to navigate through those.”