Rail workers cross picket lines as support for walkouts dwindles

The general secretary of the train drivers’ union, Aslef, talks to Judith Woods about industrial action, a confession from John Major and why he never learnt to drive

SUPPORT for strike action in one of the railways’ biggest unions appears to be waning as figures show an increase in the number of people crossing the picket line and returning to work. Network Rail figures obtained by The

Daily Telegraph appear to show that the number of RMT members opting against strike action has increased since the dispute began last summer, with one in four Network Rail employees turning up for work in the most recent round of industrial action.

In the first wave of action, one in 20 rostered Network Rail workers attended work.

It comes as talks between Network Rail and the union over a new pay and conditions deal continued this week. RMT’S Network Rail members include maintenance staff and signal workers.

The previous offer, which included a 9 per cent pay rise across two years, was put to members in a referendum, with 63.6 per cent of RMT members rejecting it. For a new deal to succeed, 2,000 members must change their vote.

RMT members who have stayed the course of the strikes so far have lost 18 days of pay, which equates to thousands of pounds in many cases.

The increase in people ignoring RMT’S strike calls has led Network Rail to plan to open up more of the country’s rail infrastructure if further industrial action takes place.

During the last wave of action, Network Rail said it was able to run 20 per cent of services on its line. However, it believes that because of the stable numbers coming back to work it can run more services if another strike was called.

When questioned on staff returning to work last week, Mick Lynch, RMT general secretary, said: “I get reports from picket lines from across the country that they are well attended and that the action we take is having the same effect as day one.”

Yesterday, the RMT was offered a new deal by the Rail Delivery Group, the body that represents rail operators. The deal includes a 9 per cent pay increase and the driver-only operated trains condition.

Mark Harper, the Transport Secretary, said the offer made by the Rail Delivery Group will not be improved. “I think they’ve got a very fair offer and it’s comparable to what you’ve got in the private sector, and I hope members of the union get the opportunity to set out their views on it,” he said.

‘If I were in charge, I would bring the railways back under public ownership’

Euston, we have a problem. Not just Euston either; Manchester Piccadilly, Glasgow Central, Bodmin Parkway and everywhere in between. Britain’s railways will once again stop running on February 1 and 3, paralysing the country. The knock-on effects will be felt for two more days and, yet again, UK PLC will be forced to put its feet up – aka work from home.

Passengers could be forgiven for their utter confusion. Last week, it was reported that light was at the end of the tunnel in the railworkers’ dispute.

Headlines implied the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), was edging towards a settlement with the Government over jobs, pay and conditions. But it proved to be a false dawn. While RMT boss Mick Lynch toured the TV studios expressing his grudging conviction that a deal could be done, Mick Whelan, boss of the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (Aslef), was quietly liaising with his train-driver members before the latest bombshell announcement.

The distinction is crucial. Why? Because when the RMT walks out, as it has done 16 times, there is disruption and a reduced service. When drivers go on strike, the entire rail network grinds to a halt.

“We haven’t had a real pay rise since 2019. That’s why we have held six days of action over six and a half months, which is hardly manning the barricades every week,” says Whelan, with an air of practised reasonableness. “Our members think we should be going in harder and faster and there’s a clamour for us to do more. The public have been very supportive. When asked, naturally they don’t like the inconvenience. But they understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it because they want a pay rise, too.”

On Radio 4’s Today programme last week, presenter Nick Robinson skewered Whelan on Office for National Statistics figures that showed his drivers had benefited from a 17 per cent real terms increase between 2009 and 2021, compared with the average employee who got 1 per cent.

Despite operating companies offering Aslef drivers an 8 per cent pay rise over two years, a deal that would have seen the average salary rise almost £5,000 to £65,000 by the end of 2023, it was rejected out of hand.

“‘Not only is the offer a real-terms pay cut, with inflation running north of 10 per cent, but it came with so many conditions attached that it was clearly unacceptable. It wasn’t designed to be accepted,” says Whelan.

Shortly thereafter, rail minister Huw Merriman told MPS that industrial action by the collective rail unions was costing the industry £25million per day in the week, and £15million on a weekend day. The total amount is a staggering £500million – more than the cost of settling the pay dispute.

It’s a bright, brisk morning when I meet Whelan at the London headquarters of Aslef, which incidentally used to be Pink Floyd’s recording studio. There’s clearly a

Dark Side of the Moon gag hanging in the air but I make do with cracking a joke comparing the two Micks to the

Spitting Image political puppets of a pipsqueak David Steel poking out of big David Owen’s top pocket.

Whelan, who is quite clearly big Owen in this metaphor, remains entirely deadpan at the quip but I like to think he’s smiling inside. I imagine the far more bellicose Lynch would hurl something at me if I said he was in anyone’s pocket. Apart from his members, obviously.

Aside from the same first name, the parallels between the two union leaders are remarkable. Both are of Irish heritage, both grew up on the same West London estate and even attended the same primary school. They are both bald. They are both militant. But these pantomime Union Baron Hardups are not to be confused.

Famous Mick is Mick Lynch, the one most of us have heard of. He has a membership of 83,000 from mainline and underground railways, shipping and offshore, buses and road freight. He is the amusingly truculent one who went viral after tearing a strip off Piers Morgan last year. He has also appeared on Have I Got News for You and although he smirked at the predictable jibes, wasn’t very funny.

Powerful Mick, Mick Whelan, represents just over 21,000 members at Aslef, but as they are all train drivers, he has far more leverage. He’s less shouty and hasn’t been invited onto

Have I Got News for You, although his recent quick-fire response to the Transport Select Committee bodes well; when asked how many times he had met with the transport secretary, he drily replied: “Which minister? We’ve had three in a month.”

Whelan, 63, works in the messiest office I have seen in a long while, strewn with papers and Chelsea memorabilia, attesting to his lifelong support for the Blues. A burly, bearded figure in a pinstriped suit with a Paul Smith scarf, he has a warm and not disagreeable doughy handshake and smells nice (it transpires his wife, newly retired from the health service, buys him Eau Sauvage).

I find it hard to square this personable – dare I venture, likeable – chap with the man described in one tabloid as “deeply unpleasant” by “sources” close to government officials after a meeting with Secretary of State for Transport Mark Harper.

I ask him outright about it: did he shout? Did he swear? Sing The Red Flag? “I was a bit baffled,” he says. “I felt our discussion had been frank and wide-ranging so I consulted my political officer, who was with me at the time, and he said I had spoken for 45 minutes and there was nothing untoward about my manner. Why would there be? The facts speak for themselves.” Maybe, then, it was the facts that the government apparatchiks found so unpleasant?

Getting to grips with Britain’s rail transport is a hellishly difficult undertaking for civilians, as it somehow contrives to be both fiendishly complicated and mindnumbingly boring. In short; there are a bewildering number of companies (28 in total) and the union must negotiate separately with each company.

“We have successfully negotiated pay deals with 13 train companies in the past 12 months,” says Whelan. “We are in dispute only with those 15 companies which have failed to offer their drivers – our members – anything. These drivers have not had an increase since April 2019, despite soaring inflation.

“During the pandemic, the Government came to us and said, ‘we need trains to run, we need them to take food and medicine and key workers around the country’. We agreed, we did the right thing and went to work. Afterwards, we expected a degree of respect for what we had done, which wasn’t forthcoming.

“It is time the companies – encouraged, perhaps, by the Government – sat down with us and got serious,” he adds. “That is the way – and the only way – to end this dispute.”

There is an argument that this is no battle for scant government resources; the train drivers aren’t tussling with nurses and teachers and civil servants for a salary hike, because they are paid by privately-owned companies.

“We are not employed by the Government, we are employed by the privatised train companies, which are making enormous profits,” says Whelan. “Strikes are always a last resort but the intransigent attitude of the train companies – with the Government acting, with malice, in the shadows – has forced our hand.”

At the heart of the railways is a contradiction: they have been fully privatised since 1997 but a great many of us have forgotten that salient detail, because of the amount of government interference.

Whichever version of “the truth” you believe, optics are key. The Government is conscious that being seen to give in to any sector could open the proverbial floodgates. Hence, it would rather a £500million dispute, that equates to a one-off 15 per cent payment for staff.

“You know, Mrs Thatcher only ever travelled on a train once, but she was quite pro-rail,” observes Whelan. “Even she said the privatisation of the railways was a privatisation too far.”

But the next Conservative government led by John Major pressed ahead. And now we are wrestling with the consequences. It’s no exaggeration to say that even before the strike action, the sector was limping from crisis to crisis, beset as it was with overcrowding, cancellations and punitively high ticket prices.

“A couple of years ago, I bumped into John Major on a train,” says Whelan. “I said, ‘I don’t believe it has turned out well’, and he said he ‘didn’t think it had turned out as he had anticipated’ and suggested that we should talk about it sometime. We never have but that would be an interesting conversation.”

Whelan knows chapter and verse about trains; he has worked on the railways – first as a guard and then as a driver – for 39 years. The grand plan was to go to university and read economics and social history; having passed his 11-plus he attended The Oratory, the Catholic school where a certain Tony Blair later sent his children to be educated.

But a dramatic change in family circumstances put an end to those ambitions. His mother had a job at a sweet shop and after his bricklayer father was badly injured in a scaffolding accident and was no longer able to work, Whelan briefly took a clerical post with a bank, then joined the railways and never looked back.

“There is a real skill to driving a 300ton train at 100 miles an hour-plus and stopping at a point you can’t see,” he says. “But it was the whole industry, the people rather than the trains that I fell in love with. I’m proud to be part of the railway family; if I were in charge I’d bring it back under public ownership.”

According to a Yougov poll carried out in November 2022, 58 per cent of Conservative voters either supported or “tended to support” a renationalisation of the railways. Just 7 per cent “strongly opposed” it. The equivalent headline figure among all adult voters was 68 per cent.

Few tears were shed at the demise of British Rail in 1997, but only a fool could defend the state of our transport network, the mere mention of which conjures up terms such as “Byzantine” and “Kafkaesque”.

A cynical lack of forward planning (it costs £60,000 to train a train driver) means there literally aren’t enough drivers to cover services. Passengers are at the mercy of what industry commentators have termed “obscenely complicated” ticketing systems – with different companies charging different amounts at different times, for tickets that are only valid on certain routes, with prices depending on the date of purchase.

“The railways lack a guiding focus on public customers, coherent leadership and strategic direction. They are too fragmented, too complicated and too expensive to run. Innovation is difficult. Incentives are often perverse.” Not the words of any union firebrand, but the opening statement of this Government’s own report.

The William-shapps Plan for Rail, published in May 2021, was unflinching in its analysis of the problems. It proposed the establishment of Great British Railways, which will own the infrastructure (Network Rail would be absorbed into this new organisation), receive the fare revenue, run and plan the network and set most fares and timetables.

Making railways pay their way has always been problematic. Victorian investors who speculated on the railway-building boom of the 19th century often lost fortunes as a result, and many branch lines have never made a profit.

Ironically, various companies introduced through privatisation are state-owned. Just not by our state. Arriva is German, Abellio Dutch and Avanti is a consortium owned by the UK’S Firstgroup and Italian state railway Trenitalia. They make a profit in Britain and return it to their own countries’ railways.

Regardless of one’s politics, there is something that feels egregiously wrong about it. A fortnight ago, it was revealed that the Dutch state netted a £20million dividend from East Midlands Railway, via parent company Abellio, despite being bankrolled by taxpayers during the pandemic.

Last week, Avanti West Coast, which is partially owned by Trenitalia, handed £13.5million to its shareholders during its latest financial year, a rise of £2million.

There is an estimated £2billion hole in annual rail industry budgets, post-covid. Fewer commuters means that journey numbers are only 80 per cent of what they were three years ago. But some, including Whelan, argue that trains don’t need to make profits.

“Prior to the pandemic, for every £1 spent on the rail network, £5 came back into the economy, so railways don’t have to make a profit in order to be profitable,” he points out. “For every £1 now that we spend, we get £2 back, but fares are beyond many people’s reach.

“We need to get more people on the railways for hospitality, for tourism, to cash in on the grey pound and make day trips affordable,” he continues. “Prior to the pandemic, the Government was concerned about how we could meet our Kyoto and Paris climate change commitments; that would happen through decarbonisation and electrifying of the lines. But ideologically we have a government using this as an opportunity to cut the workforce and erode conditions.”

Ah, yes, ideology. Fine in times of plenty. But ideology smacks of utter self-indulgence in a cost of living crisis. Union militancy is matched by waste, inefficiency and bloated bureaucracy in Network Rail and the train companies, which employ almost 400 full-time staff, known as “train delay attributors’’, to argue with each other about who is to blame for individual delays.

A 199-page rule book specifies, among other things, that if a train hits a large bird and is delayed, it is Network Rail’s fault. If it is delayed by hitting a small bird, however, it is the train operator’s responsibility. There are actual arguments about magpies. It would be the stuff of farce, if it weren’t already a tragedy.

Leaves on the line; the wrong type of snow. In last July’s heatwave, we saw workers painting train tracks white to reflect the light as temperatures hit 40C and speed restrictions were brought in across the network. We have come to accept substandard as standard.

“I just want to resolve this, so I don’t have tabloids knocking on my door, or my 13-year-old granddaughter being hassled by journalists asking to comment on her grandad,” says Whelan. “I routinely get death threats and vile abuse on email. I understand there’s a level of scrutiny to be expected from my job, but that’s for me – leave my family and friends alone.”

He has three adult sons – who variously work as an electrical engineer, in the telecoms industry, and the restaurant trade, and still lives in the same three-bedroom house in Wembley he bought as a train driver. His wife, Lorraine Phelan, was a senior biomedical scientist with the NHS, who ran laboratories during Covid and was made an MBE.

Whelan is also three years away from retirement, although colleagues describe him as a “workaholic”. His diet mainly consists of station concourse sandwiches.

“Once this is settled, I will get back to my day job of pushing for decent conditions and more investment in the railways,” he says. “We are a 800-mile long island and we need to build transport links to places where we’re going to build houses that will boost the local economy.”

He also points to “the many” other pressing issues to tackle; an alarming rise in sexual assaults on-board trains, the fact there are no lavatory facilities for drivers meaning they can’t take a loo break for five or six hours.

“It’s such a widespread problem that notices are put up by the management warning against throwing Lucozade bottles full of urine out of the cab,” says Whelan.

“We have drivers who wear Tena pads because they know they won’t be able to get through their shift. We had a case last February where a driver died because he went down to track level to take a leak and was hit by another train.”

Whatever you may think of his politics, Whelan is the real deal. A passionate railwayman to his core, he never even learned to drive. I can’t help thinking that once this is all over, he should board a train with Michael Portillo and between them they could thrash out the future of rail. “I’d quite enjoy that,” nods Whelan.

It’s so crazy it might just work.

‘You know, Thatcher only ever travelled on a train once, but she was quite pro-rail’