Passengers may lose patience with the government before it can make the changes needed to fix the railway, the rail minister, Lord Hendy, admitted, as he promised that action was coming after “years of torpor”.

The government is midway through a consultation on plans for a reformed, integrated Great British Railways (GBR), with legislation to enact it coming later in 2025, Hendy said.

But while Hendy said important changes were happening before the new body was formed, problems in the industry could take many years to fix, he warned a rail conference in London.

Asked how long passengers would trust in government reforms, with rail fares rising and persistent punctuality problems, Hendy said: “I doubt they will be as patient as maybe it needs, the time to really fix the railway – but actually what we inherited fundamentally doesn’t work so well and has performance issues which will take some to fix.

“We need to fix them as fast as we can. Some of the public sector operators we’ve inherited don’t function particularly well. There’s a huge amount of work going into Northern – I could say that Northern was in public ownership for several years and not much was done about it.

“The railway as a whole has fundamental performance issues, one of which is that it doesn’t have enough drivers. And that will take far longer to fix than we would like – but it’s really important to start doing that.”

He insisted that “after six years of torpor, there’s a huge amount going on”.

Hendy said that he and the leader of the GBR transition team, the Network Rail boss Andrew Haines, had been “getting increasingly frustrated talking about reform while nothing happened”.

“The most miserable thing was the introduction of a draft bill that pretended the government was serious about reform – but it wasn’t and it didn’t happen,” Hendy said.

He said that the creation of a shadow GBR team would mean that even this year, there would be “people in charge waking up knowing that they are going to be held accountable”.

“For the first time in 30-odd years, there will be pieces of railway run by one person [responsible for] operations, infrastructure, rolling stock … so that their failures and delays meetings are not contractual, are not about allocating financial penalties, but actually about fixing yesterday’s failures today so they don’t happen tomorrow,” he added.

However, this year’s spending review is expected to impose brutal cuts on unprotected departments, including transport, as defence and health absorb the government’s slender resources.

Hendy was speaking as commuters faced higher fares on the railway, after Sunday’s statutory rise. The rail minister defended the scale of the rise – only the second to outstrip inflation in 13 years – saying it was lower than average wage increases. He added that the government had to – as the Conservatives long maintained – drive down the cost of rail and put more of the burden on passengers rather than the taxpayer.