Jeremy Corbyn has called on the prime minister to intervene to stop the ongoing rail disruption in the north of England, as MPs launch an inquiry into the chaos on train services across the UK.

The Labour leader said the government should be taking urgent action to help passengers who have faced thousands of cancellations and delays on Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) and Northern rail services since a new timetable was introduced two-and-a-half weeks ago.

“The government must take urgent action to fix the travel chaos unleashed on the north of England by Chris Grayling’s failures,” Corbyn said in a statement on Tuesday.

“Northern communities already only get a fraction of the transport investment that the south-east receives. The Tories should be working day and night to put this scandal right.

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“Their failure to do so shows their disregard for people in the towns and cities in the north. If the transport secretary won’t stop trying to pass the buck, Theresa May must personally intervene to sort out this mess and end the disruption to people’s lives.”

Theresa May described the rail disruption as “absolutely unacceptable” at Tuesday’s cabinet meeting where ministers were briefed by Grayling. “It is important we get to grips with this issue quickly,” she said. “The current passenger disruption is letting people down.”

The prime minister’s official spokesman said May described the need to fix the problem as “an absolute priority”, and that those affected must be “properly compensated”.

She said the new timetable would deliver hundreds more services when properly implemented, but that until this could be done there was a need to “urgently minimise the disruption”.

The transport select committee said it would launch an inquiry into the rail timetable debacle. The committee chair, Lilian Greenwood, said the MPs would seek “to properly understand why the introduction of the new timetable has gone so badly wrong, what is being done to put it right and the steps needed to prevent this happening again”.

“The secretary of state has said there have been ‘major failures’ – we want to unpick this mess and understand how it can be prevented from occurring in December, when another timetable change is due,” Greenwood said.



Network Rail, GTR and Northern have all apologised for the chaos, saying they did not have sufficient time to plan for the introduction of the new timetables because of delayed engineering works. They said the disruption had come as part of “the biggest modernisation [of the railways] since the Victorian era”.

Failing Chris Grayling and the tale of the troublesome trains Read more

Grayling faced furious questions from MPs of all parties on Monday after making a statement to the Commons on the rail crisis. He announced he had commissioned an independent inquiry, led by the Office of Rail and Road chairman, Prof Stephen Glaister, into the timetable fiasco.



He said his officials would also launch a review into whether GTR and Northern had breached their contracts, and what sanctions they should face.



Speaking in the Commons, Greenwood said Grayling had signed off GTR’s unworkable timetable despite Network Rail’s reservations, and had demanded cuts in spending on planning. Grayling responded that he had followed the advice of the industry readiness board.



Mick Cash, the general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union, called on Grayling to meet rail staff, who were being “hung out to dry as human shields for a failed Tory privatisation dogma”. He called for support and protection for union members, who were being abused by angry passengers, “before we have a major incident on our hands”.

On Tuesday morning, major newspapers across the north of England joined together to demand that May “get a grip” on the government’s response to the crisis.

The 25 titles, which are owned by various groups and include the Manchester Evening News, the Liverpool Echo and the Yorkshire Post, called on May to lead an emergency summit in Downing Street this week to find a solution to the crisis, and urged a review of rail franchising.

Transport for the North – which has a mandate to make recommendations to the Department for Transport, Network Rail, Highways England and HS2 Ltd – called for compensation for Northern passengers who had bought advanced or season tickets for the next two months, a reduction in the cost of disrupted journeys, and for tickets to be accepted on other rail operators and modes of transport.