Javid: May wrong on police pay
Why should passengers pay runaway salaries to workers who reject all attempts at reform?
SAJID JAVID told Theresa May she had made the “wrong decision” when she blocked a 3 per cent pay rise for the police, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.
In a letter to Downing Street, the Home Secretary criticised the Prime Minister’s rejection of an official recommendation on increasing pay for officers of all ranks.
He said he had been “strongly in favour” of the rise and warned rejecting it would mean officers would get “a small 1 per cent pay rise in reality”. On Tuesday Mrs May had hailed the “formidable courage” and professionalism of the police and other emergency services who “ran towards” danger in the Westminster vehicle attack.
But last night her comments were criticised by the Police Federation, which accused her of celebrating their work while “stabbing them in the back” over pay and budget cuts.
Since his appointment in April, Mr Javid has clashed repeatedly with the Prime Minister over policing and her
migration policy, including calling for more front-line officers.
His approach has seen him touted by Tory MPS as a potential successor to Mrs May, with the ability to draw support from MPS on both sides of the Brexit debate.
The latest row erupted last month after the Prime Minister rejected calls from the independent Police Remuneration Review Body to give police an effective pay rise of 3 per cent, including a one-off “bonus” of 1 per cent.
She instead opted to increase police pay by 2 per cent, rejecting calls to repeat the bonus payment of last year.
Mr Javid’s letter to Downing Street last month made clear his disappointment at the rejection. It stated: “The Home Secretary was strongly in favour of this.” A 2 per cent award, he said, meant that “he continues to be of the view that this is the wrong decision”.
Mr Javid’s comments were contrasted with his public comments the next day, when he said: “This award represents the highest consolidated pay award since 2010. I’ll continue to fight on behalf of police to ensure they have the resources they need to do their jobs effectively.” A Downing Street source said: “The Prime Minister has respect and admiration for all the work officers do, from the people who look after her in No 10 to the work that everyone does on the front line.”
The letter bears striking similarities to a letter from Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, to Downing Street objecting to the pay settlement for soldiers. He, too, described Mrs May’s failure to honour a 2.9 per cent pay rise for military personnel as the “wrong decision”.
♦ The Government was also on a collision course with rail workers yesterday, when the Transport Secretary said their pay rises should not be a “notch above” the public sector. Chris Grayling said he was “bitterly disappointed” that rail unions were demanding above-inflation rises as the Government planned to link them to the Consumer Price Index, a lower measure, rather than the Retail Price Index.
Ahead of planned demonstrations at railway stations today, Mr Grayling said the proposal was consistent with pay structures in the NHS and in schools.
What a happy railway system we would have if the trains arrived on time as often as the unions demanded higher pay. Yesterday, following the news that Britain’s beleaguered commuters will see ticket prices rise by as much as 3.2 per cent in January, Transport Secretary Chris Grayling dared to suggest that both fares and future wage rises for rail staff be linked to the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), rather than the higher Retail Prices Index (RPI).
Mick Cash, leader of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), promptly popped up on the Today programme warning that the Government would not be allowed to “cap” the wages of his members. But if he is expecting public sympathy, he might find it as hard to come by as a reliable train to Gatwick Airport.
When the rail system was privatised 20 years ago, it was supposed to mark the end of bolshie unions holding the public to ransom. With the rail system broken up and run by a dozen or so private firms, no more would the unions be able to spring a national strike on travellers in order to press for unreasonable pay demands.
Instead, they would have to negotiate professionally with their employers, knowing that if they were too greedy and forced their company’s fares too high, a rival rail company would be there to snap up its business.
That was the theory. But instead we have had strike after strike. Rail workers have enjoyed a pay bonanza on a scale which they never saw under British Rail – indeed, which hardly any other group of workers has enjoyed, public or private sector.
In 1997, just after privatisation, the basic pay of a driver on the London to Brighton line was £11,000 a year. If pay had risen with RPI it would now be £19,500 a year. Instead, as a result of a deal agreed by Southern railway to end last year’s strikes, it will rise to a basic of £63,000 – for a four-day week. With overtime, drivers will be earning £75,000 a year – enough to put them in the top 3 per cent of UK household earnings and within Jeremy Corbyn’s proposed supertax bracket.
There is nothing unusual about the salaries on offer to drivers at Southern. Two years ago, Virgin Trains advertised for 78 new drivers on salaries on £57,000. Unsurprisingly, it was inundated with 15,000 applications – which rather destroys any argument that fat salaries are required to tackle recruitment problems.
All this money for a job which requires no special qualifications, other than an absence of colourblindness. Train drivers require a few weeks’ training, followed by 200 supervised hours behind the controls, and that is it. The main challenge of the job, as one Southern Rail driver told the Guardian in an unguarded moment in an interview a few years ago, is monotony, technology having made the job so easy that it is a struggle to maintain attention.
So how has a group of lightly skilled workers been able to bid up its pay to such absurd levels?
Rail companies threatened with strike action have balked at tackling the unions. They have found it far easier instead to go to the Government and beg for ever-larger state handouts. Bizarrely, the subsidies paid to the rail system have more than doubled in real terms since privatisation. In 1994/95, the last full year before privatisation, taxpayers paid £1.7 billion (in 2016/17 prices); in 2016/17, it was £4.2 billion.
The Government has also long refused to take on the rail unions, arguing that rail companies are private businesses, so it is none of the Government’s business what they pay their staff. But with £4.2 billion of taxpayers’ money going into rail companies’ pockets, I would say it rather is our business how much rail staff are paid. Moreover, these are monopoly businesses. Rail companies have their patches protected by the franchising system. So yes, Mr Grayling is right in his belated decision to intervene in rail workers’ pay. But he will need a hard hat. I have long since concluded that the reining-in of militant rail unions will require as much political will as did challenging the National Union of Mineworkers in the Eighties.
Another idea may be simply to abolish train drivers. It is bizarre that the Government is facilitating the development of driverless cars before it invests in driverless trains. It is so much easier to automate trains – which run on dedicated, private tracks with predetermined stopping places – than it is to do the same for road vehicles. This is not futuristic technology – it is already tried and tested. There are more than 30 metro systems around the world which already run without any drivers. One of them, indeed, is in London – the Docklands Light Railway, which has been running perfectly safely without drivers for the past 31 years.
The rail industry has failed to deliver a service which is value for passengers’ or taxpayers’ money, or is free from union disruption.
It is high time for technology to be deployed to ensure that train drivers meet their Waterloo.