The Greater Anglia franchise operates in the East Anglia region of England and transports passengers on intercity, commuter and rural networks, including services between Stansted Airport and London Liverpool Street. Abellio UK retained the right to operate the Greater Anglia franchise for a further nine years, from 16 October 2016 until 2025. As of this date Abellio will manage this franchise in a 60/40 joint venture with Mitsui.
The new Greater Anglia franchise will provide new trains for the entire fleet: 660 vehicles will be built by Bombardier in Derby, and 378 vehicles by Stadler in Switzerland. All trains are leased to the operator, meaning there will be no residual value risk for Abellio. These will all be in service by the end of 2020, and will provide 33,000 extra seats for weekday commuters. Additionally, there will be an entire station refresh, a new timetable aimed at improving customer satisfaction, and new facilities and retail outlets. Bike&Go will also be extended to five more locations.

Abellio London & Surrey

Abellio London & Surrey predominantly operates bus services under contract to Transport for London (TfL) from five leased bus depots located in South and South West London. In addition, the Surrey entity provides both contracted and commercial bus services in North West Surrey from a leased depot in Byfleet.
In its London operations, Abellio is contracted by TfL to operate 47 routes, each on a five-year contract with a potential two-year extension. 2016 has seen heavy bidding activity for AL&S, which now operates 8.4% of the London bus market – up from 5.45% in January 2012; in 2016, AL&S lost five routes and gained a further five. At the end of 2016, AL&S had a fleet of 765 buses.
AL&S is expecting to expand its depot capacity by adding another depot in Southall (West London) in late 2017. This is expected to increase fleet capacity by approximately 130 buses, and will complement the organic growth which AL&S will continue to pursue in 2017 and beyond.

Performance

Abellio London (West), part of Abellio London and Surrey, came in at the top of TfL’s performance league table in 2016.

Safety

AL&S achieved a Road Traffic Accident rate of 40.2 per million kilometres in 2016.

Merseyrail

Abellio UK operates Merseyrail on a 50% joint venture basis with Serco, in a franchise agreement with Merseytravel. The contract started in 2003 and will run until 2028. Merseyrail is a suburban metro service in and around Liverpool which runs almost 800 trains per day, carrying over 100,000 passengers on an average weekday. There are 66 stations on the network, four of which are underground in the city centre, providing access to work, study, shopping and leisure destinations for Liverpool residents.
Now that Merseyrail is halfway through its franchise, plans for how to deliver the second half of the franchise were put in place and agreed in 2016. These involve three major transformational programmes: a new fleet, smart card technology rollout, and taking some of its asset management from Network Rail in house. In addition, significant planning has been underway to deal with the closure of the Wirrall Loop line at the start of next year. Between January and June 2017, the existing concrete and track between Wirral and Liverpool will be dug out and new concrete and track laid in its place. The new rolling stock has been ordered from Stadler by the franchise holder, Merseytravel, to be running by 2020. Abellio UK is supporting Merseyrail in its transformation activities, bringing lessons learned from its other franchises.

ScotRail

Abellio UK started operating ScotRail on 1 April 2015. The contract is for ten years, with a seven-year break clause exercisable at year five. ScotRail provides inter-urban services between the seven cities of Scotland; urban services around the Glasgow conurbation, urban services serving Edinburgh, and rural services reaching straight across Scotland. As part of the franchise agreement, Abellio UK entered ScotRail into an alliance with Network Rail, creating a workforce of 7,500 people and providing more than 98 million passenger journeys per year.
The alliance is a commitment from Abellio and from Network Rail – the UK’s infrastructure provider – to work together closely to deliver efficient and safe operations every single day. In practice this means combined teams, and the ScotRail Alliance is jointly run by Abellio ScotRail and Network Rail.
Our vision for ScotRail includes initiatives to be delivered over the life of the franchise to improve the passenger experience and customer satisfaction. A number of initiatives were delivered in 2016, which included expanding Customer Information Screens and CCTV sets across the network, providing an additional 800 cycle spaces at stations, transforming retail provisions at eight stations (ToGo retail kiosks), refurbishing ten scenic trains (Class 158), upgrading the underpass at Kilmarnock station (which involved artwork from a local artist) and enabling all season tickets to be held on smart cards. In addition to this, the multimillion pound station redevelopment schemes at Inverness and Aberdeen were commenced in 2016 and the new fleet project is ongoing, with the first Class 385 due to be operational towards the end of 2017.
ScotRail experienced challenges during 2016 due to a significant downturn in the Scottish economy, an oil-related slow-down in North East Scotland, extended industrial action over the proposed implementation of driver-controlled operations, and some further challenges associated with extensive engineering works with in the closure of the Winchburgh Tunnel and the Queens Street Blockade. This meant that ScotRail did not meet its performance targets in 2016.
ScotRail’s performance target is to have a moving annual average (MAA) of its public performance measure (PPM) of 91.3% or higher. In October, the MAA figure was 89.6%; this was the fourth month in a row where the target was not met, which caused Transport Scotland to request a performance improvement plan. This has already resulted in an improved punctuality figure of 91.6% for the month of January 2017, however in comparison to other national operators, ScotRail is in the top ten (see table below, which shows the number of trains operated per day per operator and the punctuality figure per operator in UK).

Abellio UK is helping ScotRail to implement its performance improvement plan. This is partially dependent on the delivery of agreed initiatives from other parties (such as Network Rail). The performance plan includes a series of initiatives and actions which will steer ScotRail towards hitting its performance targets in early 2017. Some of these include:

• The identification, monitoring and protection of the ‘Golden Trains’ that, if delayed, have the biggest impact on the rest of the rail network;

• A programme of upgrades to trains to rectify the most common causes of faults; and

• An £8-million Asset Improvement Programme to replace or enhance key pieces of critical railway infrastructure in order to ensure that they are working at their absolute best.

Abellio UK is also helping ScotRail to improve its passenger communications initiatives so that passengers are kept informed of any disruptions before and during their travel. In addition to this, the political environment in Scotland remains uncertain and is being closely monitored.

• *Due to a change in systems, the methodology for calculating available hours has changed from 2015. This change affects the LTIFR.