Welcome to our first edition of our West Coast Partnership stakeholder newsletter.

Through this quarterly publication we’ll be keeping you up to date on progress with exciting plans for new trains, more seats and more services for Avanti West Coast customers, and how our West Coast Partnership Development business will be working with stakeholders to deliver the Government’s unprecedented investment in high speed services.

None of this can be delivered without you, and as Partnership and Strategy Director I’ll be building the structures for collaboration that will give stakeholders across Britain a clear voice in the development and delivery of new services, new products and high speed operations.

Establishing such a comprehensive collaboration framework is a major undertaking and is certainly a first for any train company in the UK. It will take several more months to get the framework up and running fully, but it includes plans for new local and national consultative forums, Parliamentary surgeries, surveys, and more frequent external briefings on our progress.

We’re also building a network of seven new Regional Growth Managers for England, Scotland and Wales. Our aim is to establish this team fully over the next few months, and give every stakeholder on our network a senior, single point of contact for any issues they wish to raise, whether related to Avanti West Coast services or the detailed planning of HS2 services. In the meantime you can reach us to discuss anything on stakeholders@avantiwestcoast.co.uk

Inevitably the impact of COVID-19 is having an impact across our company, and Avanti West Coast’s Managing Director, Phil Whittingham, sets out in this newsletter the measures we’re taking to keep our customers and our people safe. Looking to the future, the Managing Director of West Coast Partnership Development discusses why the plans for high speed services will be more crucial than ever as the Government addresses the challenge of economic recovery.

I hope you find these and the other items interesting, and please do give us your feedback via the email address above so we can shape future editions of the newsletter with your help.