Solving Northern Rail's problems is a 'big priority', the new Transport Secretary says

She was speaking amidst the announcement yesterday that three train operators - South Western Railway, c2c and Greater Anglia - will be brought into public ownership next year.

However, BBC Radio 4 presenter Emma Barnett raised the case of Northern, which is currently run by the Department for Transport as an operator of last resort.

The Office of Rail and Road recently found that 80 per cent of Northern train cancellations were caused by the operator, the most of any train company.

Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham said the service provided amounted to a “betrayal of the North”, with one in 10 trains over half term cancelled.

Ms Alexander told the BBC: “I don’t pretend there aren’t problems on Northern, because there are and it's a big priority for me and the ministerial team to be working with the leadership there.”

Recently Northern executives told the region’s mayors that the operator’s performance has been declining since 2015, and claimed it will take another three years to get services up to a respectable level.

Managing director Tricia Williams said they hoped to secure a Sunday working agreement for conductors, which would make a big improvement to its reliability.

Currently, conductors do not have any requirement to work on Sundays, and this issue is particularly acute in the North West and between Manchester and Sheffield.

Speaking about nationalisation, Ms Alexander said LNER, which serves Leeds and Doncaster, was an example of where public ownership has improved reliability.

“If you look at some of the train operating companies that have come into public ownership, if you take LNER or South Eastern for example, we’ve got a good track record of seeing improvements on those lines,” she said.

“So if you look at LNER for example, we have reduced the number of trains that are cancelled because of staff shortages to basically zero, and we reduced other cancellations to about 5 per cent.”