Mayor says West Midlands Trains improvements will be taken into account ahead of franchise decision

The West Midlands Mayor is due to announce tomorrow if he will ask the Government to strip the under-fire operator of the franchise after giving them until the end of January to improve performance he described as "utterly woeful".

Reliability did improve during January after a disastrous 2019 and Mr Street said he would be weighing that up against the views of around 4,000 rail users spoken to by the mayor's office.

He also hit back at his mayoral election rival Liam Byrne after he said Mr Street had not "got a grip" of the situation.

The Conservative Mayor will make recommendations to the Government and, as a figure respected in Whitehall, it is thought they could hold sway. Northern rail was brought under Government control last week.

Speaking over the weekend, the Mr Street said: "Let's not pre-judge but what is definitely true is that they have improved but what I'm very conscious of is we had months of disruption before Christmas, we've had one much better month and we mustn't in any way take our foot of the gas.

"We will be looking at all the evidence and sending the letter to Grant Shapps on Monday."

Reponding to criticism from mayoral candidate Mr Byrne, a former Labour frontbencher, Mr Street said: "I actually think it has made a real difference we have been closely involved in supervising this.

"I have reacted to what happened and we've seen some concessions already from West Midlands Trains over the season ticket prices not going up, that is unique in the country, nowhere else negotiated that.

"This week we've had the news of the day ticket concession as well for all school holidays, they're recruiting more people and the fact is they have improved their performance through January.

"The performance for the three weeks of January is 88 per cent, it was well below that before Christmas so the facts are there.

"Once again I am on top of the facts, he is talking generalisations."