Bradford’s rail passengers can now use a new complaints resolution service.

The first ever Rail Ombudsman service was launched yesterday to bring fresh rigour to the industry’s customer complaints process.

Rail companies are supporting and funding the service, which will allow travellers to appeal to the Rail Ombudsman if they are not happy with how their complaint has been dealt with.The move comes amid concern over the length of time it takes for Northern Rail, the district’s largest rail operating company, to respond to complaints.

In a report by independent regulator, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), late last month, Northern Rail was found to only have answered 58 per cent of complaints within 20 working days in the first quarter of 2018/19.

The industry requirement is for operators to respond to 95 per cent of complaints within 20 working days.

In the ORR report, only four other railway networks fall below the minimum requirement.

Punctuality was the reason for almost half of the complaints against Northern Rail, according to the report.

Data looking at Cancellations and Significant Lateness (CaSL) from Network Rail shows that Northern had 11,766 CaSL failures out of 213,585 planned journeys in the first quarter of this year.

The railway company was sent a letter by the ORR in October warning it about its complaint resolution figures.

But, in a letter of response, Martin Howard, head of customer experience, stated the company was hit by a number of hurdles, including a backlog of over 3,000 complaints when multinational company, Carillion, collapsed, but that staff were working hard to rectify the situation.

This was confirmed by a Northern spokesperson who added that a team was brought in-house following the collapse of Carillion, which previously handled Northern’s complaints.

A Northern spokesperson said: “It is understandable that emotions are high following well-documented issues across the Northern network – delayed infrastructure delivery and the resulting timetable problems – which led to a significant increase in complaints and newly launched compensation claims.

“The increase in complaints coincided with a fourfold increase in delay repay compensation claims, which significantly increased the workload of our customer service team.

"Our teams work tirelessly to help our customers, have processed thousands of Delay Repay, Compensation claims and complaints and are also on hand to answer general enquiries, provide assistance to customers and also deal with lost property.

"The team is now working at full speed and is operating within the Service Level Agreement.”

ORR has welcomed the new Rail Ombudsman stating the service will make binding decisions on train companies which should improve passenger trust.

A spokesperson added: "ORR will closely monitor progress, however, and to ensure that consumers are given long-term certainty of the ability to obtain independent redress our intention remains to modify the licence to require operators to be members of the Rail Ombudsman."