The Rest Day Working saga…

TRAINCREW management has always been a bit of a black art, rather than a science. The present traincrew difficulties that beset the UK rail industry are neither new nor were they unforeseeable. Sometimes it’s worth looking at history for a solution.

Calculating how many fully productive train drivers you need at a depot to run a service is pretty easy - it’s the total number of diagrams (the train service plan) in the working week divided by the number of working days per driver. Sundays were historically outside the working week, and were covered by the drivers sharing out the work and being paid overtime for working the extra day.

The hard part is working out how many additional drivers you then need at each depot to cover for sickness, absenteeism, holidays, training, and all the other things that crop up in the life of a railway. Improving conditions for train drivers tends to lower their productivity, and over the years the ratio of spare drivers needed to cover for unavailable drivers has risen from around 28% pre-privatisation to around 50% today - and in some cases even more. The number of drivers you needed is known as ‘the establishment’.

In BR days, the railway was cost-driven. Provided you hit your cost targets you were allowed to indulge in revenue growth schemes, but costs came first. Salaries were much lower than post-privatisation. In this environment, driver establishments were sometimes either deliberately set too low or there was a mutual agreement with the Trades Unions to run with a vacancy gap, to enhance take home pay without creating a Pension liability. Everybody won.

The downside of this cost-saving strategy was that the train service could only be covered by goodwill. Whenever there was a spat between ASLEF and management - regardless of cause the withdrawal of this goodwill became a stick with which unions could beat management. It was major industrial relations (IR) flaw

At privatisation, IR risk passed to the new operators - the train operating companies (TOCs). Just as importantly, the railway switched from cost to become revenue-driven, to increase profitability once the early savings had been taken. Profitability was driven by increasing ridership, which in turn was driven by train service reliability and performance, day in and day out. You can’t make money if you’re affected by strikes.

The more far-sighted TOCs saw poor IR as a major barrier to passenger growth. They needed to negotiate away this IR trap and to employ their most valuable resource (train drivers) on a more professional basis.

Conditions of employment were renegotiated. The working week for these TOCs was changed to encompass all seven days. Establishments were reset so that they could cover all the foreseeable needs (including retirements). And commitments were made by management to recruit to the establishment. Drivers in return received a significant pay rise and their entire higher salary became pensionable.

Everyone was happy. The drivers had better earnings for the same hours and a better pension. The TOCs that made these changes removed the IR lever that threatened reliability, and the fares revenue began to flow in. The Department for Transport saw its franchises gain value. And ASLEF gained members (and with them their new subscriptions).

Not every TOC went that way. Some left drivers’ conditions largely alone, some tinkered with contracted Sundays, and the more foolish ones didn’t even bother to set realistic establishments or even maintain the establishments they actually had.

Sometimes a franchise was simply unable to afford to restructure its traincrew conditions, because the franchise wasn’t profitable enough to afford the extra salaries and higher pension costs. The wiser franchises had mostly 15 years of IR peace with their drivers, but others were regularly in trouble with poor reliability driven by poor IR. The secret was keeping the establishment under review and having a recruitment plan that kept it full and productive.

COVID changed many things in life, including the railways. Almost overnight the franchises became insolvent and their owners accepted that they would become concessionaires where the revenue and cost risk for the railways would pass back to government. UK rail, once again, returned to being cost-driven.

The social distancing that came with COVID badly affected training, especially driver training. Twelve people in a classroom wasn’t seen as acceptable, nor was a train driver having another in the cab who was there to learn the traction type and the routes over which they would eventually drive. Vacancy gaps began to appear at depots that had previously been covered by overtime working. The preprivatisation IR trap had been re-created.

My ‘inner operator’ would hope that my successors were alert to the growing vacancy gap caused by the cessation of driver training, and flagged up the need to their management and the DfT to be ready to fund an accelerated programme of training to reduce the backlog. I simply don’t know if that happened or not. What I do know is that it was entirely foreseeable that ASLEF and RMT would seek to use this vacancy gap as leverage when it came to the first pay talks post-COVID.

Have we been seeing industrial action inflicted on a management doing its best to run a railway for its customers in a post-COVID world? Or have we seen management asleep at the wheel during COVID who simply forgot the lessons of the past? You decide!

Perhaps the more important question is: “Where do we go from here?”

Sufficient time has now passed since COVID to understand that new travel patterns have emerged. Weekend travel is increasing. Commuting traffic (especially in the South East) has both declined and become unevenly spread across the week. Business travel has declined, perhaps permanently. Finally, the need for industry subsidy has increased if the railway is to return to the size and shape it was before COVID.

One option is to reduce the timetable and amend the train plan to one that the industry can both afford and cover with the productive traincrew it has, and then build on that timetable and train plan as more trained staff become available. Running fewer trains also reduces maintenance costs.

Or we could just muddle on, as the industry has been doing. Not good for customers or staff, but perhaps attractive to the Treasury?

Finally, what does the industry do about its industrial relations, which in my view are as bad as they have been since 1982 (when striking drivers were threatened with dismissal)? I don’t see how a 10% (or more) pay rise fits into the Prime Minister’s impending budget. I don’t see the Trades Unions accepting a significantly lower sum. Will the DfT bring matters to a head with new anti-strike legislation, or even fire and re-hire? Would that send the Trades Unions (and not just in the railway) into orbit?

Perhaps we should turn to the industry lead body for advice? Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot that’s also been put on hold!

Graham Eccles is a retired railway operations manager. He worked in Britain’s railway industry (on and off) from 1962 to 2021.

“It was entirely foreseeable that ASLEF and RMT would seek to use this vacancy gap as leverage when it came to the first pay talks post-COVID.”