Britain’s railways have seen a rise in assaults on the workforce, according to the regulator the ORR (Office for Road and Rail).
Some 11,289 workforce assaults were reported on the mainline railway – 6,390 incidents of verbal abuse, 2,487 physical assaults and 2,412 threats – a rise of 12 per cent compared with the previous year. Some 13,464 reported assaults against passengers and members of the public on the mainline, represented an increase of 36pc on the year before, and the highest number recorded since the series began in 2004. On London Underground, assaults against passengers and members of the public increased 20pc to 5,534 in the latest year, while reported workforce assaults fell 3pc to 3,525.
Graham Richards, Director, Planning and Performance, described the increase in reported assaults as concerning. He said: “No-one on the railway should be subjected to violence, threats or abuse. We’re working with industry and our trade union colleagues to address work-related violence and harassment, including through recent guidance which sets out what we expect from rail employers. This includes understanding where the risks are, putting effective controls in place, encouraging staff to report incidents and providing appropriate support afterwards. Our inspectors will continue to check how these risks are being managed.”
For these and related safety statistics in full visit the ORR website. As background, in June the ORR announced that passengers made 1.83โฏbillion journeys on Britainโs rail network between April 2025 and March 2026, above a pre-covid high and the most since 1920.
Police
Meanwhile, in a report, the British Transport Police Authority heard that ‘BTP continues to police an increasingly busy and complex railway environment’. Between April and July 2026, 33,149 crimes were recorded, an increase of 12.6pc compared with the same period last year. This follows the Office for National Statistics (ONS) publication covering 2025/26, which reported an 11pc increase in BTP recorded crime against a 1pc reduction nationally. BTP therefore appears as an outlier in the national data, reported BTP Chief Constable Lucy D’Orsi. She told the Authority she has ‘commissioned further analysis to understand the position’.
She wrote: “Passenger numbers continue to recover and grow, increasing activity and interactions across the network, while BTP officer numbers have not increased at the same rate. We have also worked with industry partners to make reporting easier and encourage greater confidence in reporting, particularly in relation to violence against women and girls, assaults on railway staff and public order incidents.” As more generally in policing, she pointed to increased reporting, ‘something we have actively sought, but it also affects comparisons with previous years’.
She pointed to the new Section 4B public order offence (of ‘causing intentional harassment, alarm or distress to a person because of their sex, or presumed sex’) that has had ‘a notable effect on recorded crime’; accounting for about 30pc of the recent increase in public order offences and around 56pc of the combined increase in violence against the person and public order crime recording. She added that body worn video (as carried by workers) ‘has an important role to play: where footage is available, approximately 85 per cent of cases are solved, compared with around 13pc where it is not’.
Photo by Mark Rowe: Southend Central.
