Maximum number of void days

[ajdunlop]

After a dire last month of performance on the Transpennine North line FTPE have written off the 6th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 13th of November as Void Days and that doesn’t even include huge delays last week which I think will add at least 2 days. That would be 7 Void Days in one month and we are only at the start of the winter.
My question is, is there a limit to the number of days a TOC can declare as Void given it is essentially a way of 'playing the figures' to stop their performance going down because of 'exceptional' days. Surely if there are too many it would start to indicate the normal performance of the TOC not exceptions to that. Also what is the largest number of days any one has hear of a TOC declaring? Under Delay Repay are void days allowed or does the TOC performance have to go down because of exceptional events? And how often has a TOC, despite the ability to declare void days, broken it's performance targets and had to give Season Ticket holders a refund?

 

[Taunton]

Virgin started claiming a large number of Void Days in their early days of the WCML franchise, mainly due to infrastructure issues - which made the civil servants realise that as they had very few season ticket holders anyway it was financially better for Virgin to do so than not. Was nothing changed?

I never got it. The original design of franchising was that the TOC was the contact the passenger had with the industry, and the infrastructure operator (NR/Railtrack) were a supplier to them to be managed, just like the train lessor, the fuel supplier, the staff, etc. So even if the delays are down to NR, what have TPE done about it?

 

[cool110]

There aren't any void days under delay repay as TOC performance and reliability figures don't exist (PPM is a separate measure unaffected by void days).
As for TOCs failing to meet targets despite void days GWR currently have a 5% discount in 2 of 6 service groups, records for the last year and a half are available here.