Paul Clifton
PAUL CLIFTON has been reporting for the BBC on the Southern dispute since it started. He examines the reasons for the current stalemate, and whether there is any hope for a settlement
“GTR’s shareholders, Go-Ahead and Keolis, certainly aren’t profiting at the taxpayers’ expense. Quite the opposite - they’re losing out, too. They must wish they had never come near this toxic franchise.”
INDUSTRIAL action on Southern Railway has been called off. The decision was taken to allow direct negotiations between the Secretary of State for Transport and the unions, due to take place as this issue of RAIL went to press.
This is not a breakthrough - at least, not yet. It is hard to see either side offering significant compromise. Throughout a year and a half of industrial action, neither side has wavered.
By blaming the unions for most of Southern’s considerable troubles, the Government has put itself in a position from which it cannot back down.
By rejecting a 24% pay rise, ASLEF members have put themselves in a position from which they cannot back down.
By striking for 33 days, with more planned, RMT members have put themselves in a position from which they cannot back down.
By signing a management contract in which it does the Government’s bidding, Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) is in a position from which it cannot back down.
It’s deadlock. This battle has already lasted far longer than the 1984-85 miners’ strike, which was a defining event in industrial relations.
Piggies-in-the-middle, powerless passengers take the punishment. They can expect a near-3% fare rise next year, while public sector workers will be lucky if they see a 1% salary increase. In real terms, they will be paying more of their income, while train drivers argue over salaries that their passengers can only dream of earning.
There’s no sign of any public sympathy for either side now - because it seems increasingly unlikely that the dispute will be resolved this year. One Southern insider confided that he thought it would only really end with a change of operator. Eventually there would be some kind of stand-off, he suggested. But not an agreement.
The RSSB (Rail Safety & Standards Board) has produced yet more evidence that flies in the face of what drivers believe is unsafe.
RSSB analysts have studied the past six years of data concerning incidents at the platform edge across the rail network. Their conclusion: the risk of dying at the platform edge is roughly the same as the risk of being struck by lightning. It happens to three or four people a year, most frequently when a passenger is drunk and no train is present.
In comparison, 500 people a year die from food poisoning, and 1,800 people are killed in road crashes.
RSSB states that “there is no difference in the risk whether a train is guard-operated or run using driver-controlled operation”. Every previous study, without exception, has reached the same conclusion.
It says travelling by car is 21 times more risky than taking the train. Cycling is 400 times more risky, and a motorbike is 1,400 times more risky.
The train-platform interface is not even the riskiest part of the railway. Four of the 39 people who died last year in non-suicidal incidents connected to the railway were on platforms. Six died at level crossings. Most others were defined as trespassers.
I’ve spoken to plenty of Southern drivers. Their belief that DOO is less safe is honestly held and (so far as I can tell) is not fuelled by union-led malice towards their employer. Not for a moment do I doubt their sincerity and honourable intentions, even though their unions have never produced any convincing evidence to support them.
If Southern thought they could swing drivers’ hearts with the promise of money, they were sadly mistaken. Twenty-four per cent over four years is a massive pay offer, so massive that other operators are openly worried about the implications for the rest of the industry.
A Southern driver earns £49,000 now. The offer would have taken that to £60,683, plus typically £10,000 overtime.
Great Western Railway is currently recruiting drivers for the new Hitachi trains. The advertised salary for these plum jobs: £46,000.
A newly qualified teacher gets £22,500. A teacher won’t catch up with a Southern driver until they become head or deputy head of a large school.
A staff nurse gets £23,000 and a junior doctor £37,000. An air traffic controller earns £52,000.
A Flybe captain operating from Southampton Airport earns about the same as the pay offer to a Southern train driver: £67,000. But only after several years of flying. A Flybe First Officer earns less than half what a train driver would get, yet has to pay back the £80,000£100,000 bank loan taken to self-fund the pilot training.
Most of these posts are filled by people who have degrees, followed by post-graduate qualifications and then many years of learning. It takes less than two years to qualify as a train driver.
This is in no way to knock the considerable skills and huge responsibility that rests on the shoulders of the driver of a 12-car commuter train carrying 750 rush hour passengers at 90mph.
The point is this: an income of £70,000 a year for driving a train puts it out of kilter with equivalent occupations. In its attempt to buy off the drivers, GTR has offered way over the odds, at the risk of unreasonably increasing the
expectations of every other driver in the country.
And as GTR is a management contract, it is inconceivable that this was not approved by the Department for Transport, run by a Government that is telling millions of public sector workers to accept a 1% pay rise, well below the current rate of inflation. At the same time as those commuters are expected to endure a fare increase three times greater than their salary uplift.
And yet the drivers STILL rejected the deal. The result: vitriolic abuse from passengers, and widespread condemnation in the press for their outrageous greed.
But as one Southern driver told me: “We have turned down an offer that was massively in our own interests to accept. That shows this was never about the money.”
The RMT union says jobs are at stake, and that signing a deal on GTR’s terms would be the thin end of the wedge. In no time at all, guards would be gone altogether, it says.
The days of a guard operating the doors are indeed numbered, if the present Government stays in charge. It favours automation overseen by the driver, because all the evidence provided to it by the railway supports the case for doing so.
But are jobs really at stake? No. The jobs are changing, but they’re not going. According to the Rail Delivery Group, the industry took on 700 new apprentices last year alone.
The RDG also claims that the number of people working in the rail industry has risen by 11% in only two years, with 24,000 more people working for the railway and in its supply chain than in 2015. That compares with a 3% increase in employment nationwide.
The carrot being dangled in front of the unions is therefore the prospect of more members in future - not fewer.
Southern has clearly failed to deliver on its public service contract. This is not uncommon in other sectors - look at the cost over-run on the new aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy, the provision of private sector prison services, or the supply chain in the NHS. But this case does raise the question of how the public purse can be protected when a contract fails to deliver what was agreed.
GTR’s shareholders, Go-Ahead and Keolis, certainly aren’t profiting at the taxpayers’ expense. Quite the opposite - they’re losing out, too. They must wish they had never come near this toxic franchise.
So, this is about the quality of the governance. It’s about what was wrong before GTR signed on the dotted line, and it’s about how the company was not in a contractual position to put things right once it realised this. It’s about how it was unable to convince its own employees to join its direction of travel. It’s about the enthusiasm of others to pursue wider political agendas with that situation.
And it’s about a Department for Transport that would struggle to find an alternative player to replace a clearly failing franchise. Stagecoach, Virgin and Go-Ahead are the only British-based private companies risking running railways, all other operators are backed by overseas state-owned institutions.
Overall the operators are taking a 2.9% fee for managing passenger services. That’s a miserable rate of return for investors compared with (say) running buses.
Opponents of the system therefore claim it is dysfunctional. Certainly the relationships at Southern are profoundly dysfunctional, although that is not the case everywhere. FirstGroup has quietly done a deal with the unions on the Great Western, which will entail some of the new Hitachi trains running driver-only on outer-suburban routes where inter-city standard trains replace older Thames Turbos. Will First be able to pull off a similar deal at South West Trains?
Southern was the worstperforming franchise before all this started, and for reasons not entirely of its own making. It runs the busiest and most congested routes. The Gibb Report ( RAIL 830) laid bare the inadequate condition of the infrastructure, and the effects on passengers of the engineering work under way to put that right.
But GTR inherited fewer drivers than it needed. It promised to boost the numbers, and to make the railway less reliant on voluntary overtime.
Three years later, the overtime ban by ASLEF is resulting in one in four trains being cancelled every day. Obviously, it still does not have enough drivers. Do we blame the company for inept management, or do we blame a restrictive contract that squeezes costs so relentlessly that the company cannot actually find the money to train sufficient drivers?
Oh! Hang on. It can nevertheless find the money to offer every driver £12,000 a year more than the market rate, plus overtime, provided they sign up to new working arrangements which they don’t like. We’re back where we started.
If there was a straightforward way out of this untenable situation, it would have been found by now.
Perhaps we should #AskEddie. The 15-year-old work experience lad who took social media by storm is the best thing that has happened to Southern’s public image in three years. Eddie Smith was briefly left in charge of the official Twitter feed. All he did was be honest with passengers, and answer straight questions with straight answers. Everyone loved that.
“Obviously, it still does not have enough drivers. Do we blame the company for inept management, or do we blame a restrictive contract that squeezes costs so relentlessly that the company cannot actually find the money to train sufficient drivers?”