The boss of Croydon’s main train operator and Britain’s worst rail company has been awarded a £2.1m paycheck amid demands that it be stripped of its south London franchises as punishment for “abject failure”.

David Brown, chief executive of the Go-Ahead Group, which runs Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR,) has seen his salary and bonus soar by £200,000 since 2014, it emerged this week, sparking fury among politicians and unions.

GTR, which runs Southern and Thameslink services in Croydon, has long provoked passengers’ ire for delays, cancellations and overcrowded conditions.

Just 78 per cent of the company’s trains arrived at their destination on time during the second quarter of 2016, significantly worse than every other operator.

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Chris Philp, the MP for Croydon South who has led calls for GTR to be stripped of its franchise, held talks with transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin and the company’s bosses on Thursday to demand urgent improvements.

He described Mr Brown’s pay packet – enough to buy 952 Croydon-to-London Victoria rail season tickets – as “completely inappropriate”.

The MP said: “It is completely disgraceful. They are the country’s worst train line and they are getting worse.

“It is completely inappropriate that individuals should get paid for such abject failure.”

Mick Cash, general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) said: “It is truly shocking that part of the bonuses paid by the British passenger to the bosses of GTR is down to their ‘successful mobilisation’ of the current franchise.

“Commuters paying up to £5,000 a year for these failing services will be rightly furious. These bonuses are truly money for old rope.”

Transport for London is to take over the running of all suburban rail services in London by 2021, it was announced earlier this year.

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But Mr Philp is pushing for that date to be brought forward in light of GTR’s failings.

He said: “I have already called for the franchise to be removed and I repeated that call in [Thursday’s] meeting. I wanted to make sure that they both understood directly how people’s everyday lives are being made a misery by the huge level of cancellations currently happening.

“We looked at the most recent performance figures, which are terrible, [and] actually in the last two or three weeks they’ve become even worse.”

At 5pm yesterday, GTR’s live punctuality statistics for June 14 showed only 72 per cent of its trains had arrived on time.

Mr Philp said: “I will be having further meetings with the transport secretary to make sure there is follow up action.

“I would like to see an urgent improvement plan, not one that takes six months or 12 months to show results but one that shows results almost immediately.”

Last week the Government rejected calls for a formal review of GTR’s franchises.

In its response to a petition, signed by 12,466 people, protesting against the company’s “unacceptable levels of service,” the Department for Transport said a review would “not address the challenges” the operator was attempting to overcome.

It added: “The challenges of this part of the network are not new. The industry and Government are addressing the longstanding, historic problems, including driver shortages, rolling stock and network capacity.

“By 2018 we expect to return the network to the performance that all passengers deserve, and we will do it with increased capacity, renewed facilities and robust, durable infrastructure.”

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A GTR spokesman admitted passengers had “experienced a significant downturn in service, for which we sincerely apologise.”

He added: “Our service has inevitably been hit by the RMT’s industrial action by conductors which has seen a substantial increase in cancellations. Not only have we lost services on strike days but there is also an unprecedented level of conductor sickness which has now forced us to ‘pre-cancel’ 31 trains every day to limit the impact and help passengers’ better plan their journeys.

“In the latest four-week period there were 14 incidents of people hit by trains, multiple signal failures and trespassers on the track – one at Streatham North Junction causing almost 3,000 minutes of delay.”

The RMT is currently embroiled in a dispute with GTR over the future of conductor roles on Southern trains.

In a statement on Go-Ahead’s pre-close trading report Mr Brown said GTR was likely to suffer a 50 per cent drop in profit margins this year due to the “challenging performance and industrial relations environment”.

Go-Ahead paid out £36.7m to shareholders between July 2014 and June 2015.