SWR strike
Passengers “caught in the middle” as the longest strike in a generation causes South Western Railway disruption.
WHAT is on course to be the longest strike in a generation on the railway has caused widespread disruption and a reduction in services across South Western Railway.
Guards in the RMT union launched 27 days of strike action on December 2. Fewer than 400 guards are causing disruption to 600,000 passenger journeys each weekday, in a dispute over their future role on new suburban trains that will start to be delivered in 2020.
SWR has been running a little over half its normal service, with around 1,000 trains each day. More than 800 trains a day have been cancelled. Trains have run with additional carriages where possible, but many services have terminated at Basingstoke, with passengers obliged to change trains. Platform staff there say early services have been more crowded than usual. Services end by 2300 each evening.
The strike is due to run until
New Year’s Day (with the exception of polling day on December 12, as well as Christmas Day and Boxing Day, when no trains run). Before this latest action, 38 strike days had been held since the first stoppage in November 2017.
Two days of talks at the conciliation service ACAS, led by RMT General Secretary Mick Cash and SWR Managing Director Andy Mellors, appeared to have broken the deadlock just before the strike began. An email to senior SWR managers claimed that the two men had reached agreement, but the deal was subsequently rejected by the union’s National Executive Committee.
Both sides accept that the red line is about the method of dispatching new Class 701 Aventra trains, which are designed for the doors to be operated by the driver.
The union insists that the guard must inform the driver that a train is safe to depart before either the driver or the guard operates the doors.
Cash said: “The union believes that cutting the guard out of the dispatch process reduces the second person on the train to little more than a passenger in the longer term, which would give the company the option of axing them altogether at some point down the line.”
The union said the blame for the strike therefore lay wholly with SWR, but the company responded that it had done everything it could to meet the RMT’s “outdated demands”.
On December 9, Cash said: “A negotiated solution to this dispute which would cost the company nothing and meet RMT’s objectives of protecting safety and accessibility is within grasp.”
The union added: “We are not prepared to compromise on the much-needed modernisation of the service with improved performance, safety and customer service that our new fleet of suburban trains will deliver. It is clear to us that the RMT is unclear on what this dispute is about and intent on striking no matter what.”
SWR Commercial Director Peter Williams said: “We are trying to modernise the railway, with the performance and punctuality our customers want. To do that we need to introduce new working practices. We have guaranteed there will be a guard on every train, and we have guaranteed they will have safety-critical responsibilities.”
Pressed on what those responsibilities would include, Williams said: “Fundamentally it does come down to the operating of the doors. We are seeking to replicate what happens with other train operators across the UK, so it is not new. We want to apply it to South Western Railway so passengers can have more punctual and more reliable journeys.”
SWR believes Driver Controlled Operation (DCO) would save seconds at every stop, because the driver would no longer have to wait for the guard to communicate with the cab - a process that was required in the days of slam-door trains when they had neither central locking nor sensors to detect when the doors could not close correctly.
Two days into the action, the union wrote to SWR requesting fresh talks. Mellors wrote back: “We need guarantees that you are serious about ending these strikes. You took a written agreement away. Why did your National Executive Committee reject it, and what to they want instead? If the
RMT has new alternative ways of safely delivering over ten million more peak-time passenger journeys on-time every year, you need to set these out.”
Veteran rail industry leader Sir Michael Holden, who last year was commissioned by Government to report on the reasons for declining performance on SWR, said: “I think the RMT leadership are under pressure from the workforce. It’s a big ask for the members to lose so much money in the run-up to Christmas. It is quite clear to me that SWR intends to stand firm, and it has the Government behind them.
“It’s also clear that the union proposal is an absurd way of behaving with a modern train. Technology has moved on. The driver can very easily do the doors and it’s actually safer than two people doing it. And it releases the guard to do much more passengerfriendly activities, such as helping people with special needs, or prams or wheelchairs.
“On suburban services the trains are stopping every three or four minutes. That means the guard is not currently available to pay attention to the customers, because the guard is carrying out a function that is frankly not necessary anymore. You only have to look at Southern Railway, where the driver is operating the doors very successfully, where performance has improved very considerably, and where passenger satisfaction has also improved.”