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@ChasnotRobert
the infrastructure manager (IM, ie Network Rail) and Train Operators (TOCs) are incentivised to reduce delays by penalty payments for delay minutes (and in some cases bonus payments for exceeding performance metrics), known as the "performance regime".
As rhb says, to make this work it is necessary to attribute delay to prime cause, so that the right organisation picks up the bill. in the days of commercial train service franchises (these all ended during the pandemic), train operators had a profit motive to be better at analysing and challenging delay causes, to reduce their exposure to delay penalty payments. this did lead to quite a lot of effort going into delay attribution.
the benefit of this is greater understanding of the causes of delays which makes it more likely that something can be done to address the root cause. the downside was it was not efficient at a whole industry level.
it will be interesting to see how the performance regime evolves under GBR, where the P&L is combined between IM and TOC so the commercial incentive to attribute delays goes away.