State-owned East Coast paid £225m to Treasury but still faces privatisation

The state-owned East Coast railway paid £225m to the government in the year to March 2014, the last financial year before it is reprivatised.

Results published by Directly Operated Railways (DOR), the company established in July 2009 to take over the running of the London-to-Edinburgh route from the loss-making National Express, showed that its premium payments to the government had risen from £202m to £216.8m in 2014, making a total of more than £1bn over its five-year lifespan.