The importance of the Public Ownership
Act 2024: Private sector train operating company dividends 2016-25
RMT Report 28 November 2025
Introduction
To mark the anniversary of the Passenger Railways (Public Ownership) Act, RMT analysed ORR data and statutory accounts of the private train operators controlled by the DfT and devolved nations to look at their historic profit extraction and assess the scale of the waste of public subsidy involved.
This data only examines the TOCs controlled by the DfT and devolved nations, not the private sector concessions controlled by the devolved Mayors as they are not covered by the legislation.
We have also excluded dividends paid by public sector TOCs to their shareholder, the DfT. This is because these funds are recycled into the railway rather than siphoned off by shareholders. It’s worth noting that the highly successful publicly owned LNER service has paid dividends worth more than £90 million to the DfT since it was taken into public ownership.
Executive summary:
• Total dividends paid by private sector TOCs since 2016 amount to £1.8 billion (Table 1). On average, private sector TOCs paid out dividends worth on average £182 million each year since 2016.
• Total dividends paid by private sector operators since and during the pandemic amount to £510 million (Table 1). The average payment including the pandemic years was £101 million, but over the last two years, as passenger numbers recovered, has averaged £145 million.
• 2023-24 was a bumper year, with private sector TOCs paying out £190.6 million (Table 1)
• FirstGroup have extracted the most from their franchises with payouts worth more than £200 million since the pandemic, followed by Govia with £154 million and Transport UK with £114 million.
• Where it could have been spent on the railways, this money has then been siphoned off to fund dividend, interest payments and share buybacks by transport multinationals and their investment bank and asset management fund owners or profits for private equity funds.
Total private train operating company dividends paid
2016-25
• Total dividends paid by private sector TOCs since 2016 amount to £1.8 billion (Table 1). On average, private sector TOCs paid out dividends worth on average £182 million each year since 2016.
• While the figure for aggregate dividends appears to fall over time, there are several significant caveats to note. The first is that the dividends are calculated in 2024-25 prices, inflating the nominal values of the earlier dividends. This is a perfectly respectable methodology by the ORR but the effect is still worth noting.
• More substantially, the number of private train operators paying or able to pay dividends has also fallen sharply over the last few years, making the overall pool from which dividends are paid smaller. The impact of this can be seen in Figures 1 and 2. In Figure 2, the decline in dividend payments is less marked because it’s calculated as an average per train operating company. It’s also notable that the average per TOC was higher in 2023-24 than at any point previously. We return to this below.
• Thirdly, several TOCs have not filed accounts or declared their dividends yet, including Greater Anglia, South-Western Railways and c2c, who have all just come into public ownership. It is possible that all have paid out dividends as their franchises were terminated or expired. The figures for 2024-25 are therefore incomplete.
Post-pandemic dividends:
• While the rail industry was struggling to recover and build back passenger confidence and usage, and while the government of the day was stressing the need for cuts in public subsidy, the private TOCs took only a brief holiday from dividend payments.
• Total dividends paid by private sector operators since and during the pandemic amount to £510 million (Table 1). The average payment including the pandemic years was £101 million, but over the last two years, as passenger numbers recovered, has averaged £145 million.
Figure 1: Private sector TOCs and their dividends 2016-25
2023-24 - A bumper year:
• 2023-24 was a bumper year, with private sector TOCs paying out £190.6 million (Table 1).
• While 2024-25 looks more restrained, as noted above, several TOCs have not filed accounts or declared their dividends yet, including Greater Anglia, SouthWestern Railways and c2c, who have all just come into public ownership. It is possible that all have paid out dividends as their franchises were terminated or expired.
• The extent of the largesse in 2023-24 can be seen from another perspective. The number of TOCs paying dividends had fallen from 17 in 2016 to 11 by March 2025. The effect of this can be seen in Figure 1 and in the average dividend per TOC which in 2023-24 exceeded the pre-pandemic average of around
(Figure 2).
Table 1: TOC dividends 2016-25*
*Notes to Table:
• The basic source data for this table is the ORR’s release: https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/finance/rail-industry-finance/table-7226franchised-passenger-train-operator-finances-since-2015-16-by-franchise/
• Blue cells denote TOCs moving into public ownership in the accounting period.
• Green cells denote totals taken from statutory accounts to fill in data omitted by the ORR. A query has been raised with the ORR as to why they have omitted significant dividends paid in the last few years.
• The total for private sector TOCs is based on subtracting dividends paid by public sector TOCs which were recycled into the railway via the DfT.
• The number of private sector TOCs is used to establish an average dividend payout per TOC over time. This offsets to an extent the misleading impression created by simple aggregate dividend data without showing the declining number of dividend paying TOCs.
Owning Groups’ dividends post-pandemic
FirstGroup top the leader board with payouts worth more than £200 million since the pandemic. This includes £60 million from their poorly performing Avanti West Coast franchise. The Group also has two Open Access operations, Hull Trains and Lumo, whose results are not included here.
Table 2: FirstGroup Rail franchise dividends 2020-25
Govia have paid out £154 million, mostly in the last two years from their Thameslink franchise, after Southeastern was removed from them for financial misconduct. The Group has also just won a contract to operate the Elizabeth Line from the Mayor of London.
Table 3: Govia rail franchise dividends 2020-25
Transport UK have paid out £114 million from their three franchises. Transport UK also has a concession on Merseyrail, whose results are not included here.
Table 4: Transport UK dividend totals 2020-25
Arriva have paid out £35 million, almost all of which comes from their poorly performing CrossCountry franchise. The Group also have until recently held a relatively lucrative contract to run the Mayor of London’s London Overground concession.
Table 5: Arriva rail franchise dividends 2016-25
Where did the money go?
FirstGroup
• FirstGroup Plc is a transport multinational with a £1.3 billion turnover. FirstGroup is 90% owned by institutional shareholders, asset management vehicles, around 70% of whom are based in the City of London (Table 6). FirstGroup paid out £50 million in dividends to shareholders last year and also spent £92 million of its accumulated cash on buying back its own shares in 2025 in order to ramp up the value of remaining shares to their holders. It has announced that it will spend a further £50 million doing this in 2026.
• CEO Graham Sutherland took home £3,055,000 last year in his total remuneration (not salary, base salary plus various incentive payments). This was a raise of 118% up on last year’s remuneration package.1
Table 6: Major shareholders: FirstGroup plc2
1 https://www.firstgroupplc.com/investors/firstgroup-plc-ara-2025-ai-version.aspx
2 https://uk.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/FIRSTGROUP-PLC-4154453/company-shareholders/
Govia
• Govia is a joint venture established by majority shareholder Go-Ahead Group (65%) and Keolis, a subsidiary of SNCF in France (35%). Go Ahead has a £3.5 billion turnover. The company is a UK-based multinational transport company. Until 2022, Go-Ahead Group was a UK-based plc with shareholders very similar to FrstGroup’s.
• In 2022, it was bought by an Australian company, Kinetic, and a Spanish company Globalvia, and taken off the Stock Exchange.3 In 2023, following its acquisition, Go-Ahead paid £43 million in dividends to its shareholders and a further £15 million after the financial reporting year closed.
Transport UK
• Transport UK was formed in March 2023, following a management buyout of Abellio occasioned by the decision by the Dutch state operator Nederlandse Spoorwegen to divest itself of foreign transport subsidiaries. Transport UK controls four UK franchises: Greater Anglia, East Midlands, West Midlands and Merseyrail.
• Transport UK and its four English rail franchises are now owned directly by former managing director Dominic Booth and two companies, Grosvenor Walker Investments and Norton Green Investments, one of which is owned by Dominic Booth. The company has a turnover of £2.5 billion, mostly derived from its rail contracts. In 2023-2024, it made a profit of £60 million last year, attributable to the owners, £39 million of which came from management fees on its DfT contracts.4
Arriva
• Arriva is a transport multinational with a revenue of £2.45 billion. UK rail accounts for around 30% of this revenue. Arriva was formerly a subsidiary company of Deutsche Bahn, but in 2023, the company sold Arriva to a private equity fund called iSquared Capital, a fund based in Luxembourg.
3 https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/14125532/filinghistory/MzQ2OTE4MTk1MmFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf&download=0
4 https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/13663807/filinghistory/MzQ0ODMyOTA1OWFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf&download=0
