Rail boss: Unions are risking lives

● Hard-Left militants are blocking safety gear that stops staff being killed by trains, Network Rail supremo tells MoS ● He slams the union barons for spending more time on TV than talks – and threatens to cut them out ‘within days’

BRITAIN’S top rail boss has dramatically accused militant RMT union barons of putting lives at risk by blocking the introduction of vital safety equipment.

Andrew Haines, chief executive of Network Rail, lambasted the far-Left union for opposing new technology that he said would slash the risk of rail workers being hit by trains and prevent a repeat of a train crash in which three people died.

With the rail network crippled yesterday by a third day of strikes, an exasperated Mr Haines accused intransigent union bosses of trying to drag Britain back to the 1970s, and warned that negotiations over pay and jobs were ‘running out of road’.

In an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, Mr Haines:

● Revealed that Network Rail will offer workers a bigger pay rise this week than that given to NHS staff last year, and will guarantee no compulsory job losses – but only if they overhaul inefficient working practices;

● Accused RMT bosses, including firebrand General Secretary Mick Lynch, of spending more time giving TV interviews than trying to resolve the hugely damaging dispute;

● Threatened to deploy the ‘Exocet’ option of cutting union barons out of talks and putting the new deal directly to staff;

● Branded union bosses ‘deeply dishonest’ for claiming the industrial dispute is part of an assault on the working class;

● Burnished his own humble background as the son of a South Wales factory worker, and declared: ‘I can match Mick Lynch inch for inch for working-class credentials.’

The 58-year-old, who began his career as a left-luggage clerk at London’s Victoria Station, accused RMT negotiators of seeking to ‘weaponise every single element of change’ on the railways – including the introduction of safety technology.

For almost two years, Network Rail – which manages 20,000 miles of track and infrastructure – has been trying to introduce remote sensors to warn engineers if embank ments or cuttings are in danger of collapse from heavy rain.

This follows the Stonehaven disaster in August 2020 when a passenger train from Aberdeen to Glasgow derailed after hitting debris washed on to the track. The driver, a conductor and a passenger died. Mr Haines said the sensors were ready to be used across Britain – but the RMT had blocked their deployment. ‘They are not making the risk worse, but what they are doing is stopping us making it better,’ he said.

The RMT is also accused of stopping Network Rail from using drones and trackside sensors to detect faults or damage rather than sending workers on to potentially dangerous railway lines.

Highlighting the death of Tyler Byrne, 30, a Network Rail employee killed by a train travelling at 76mph in February 2021 as he inspected a track in south-west London, Mr Haines said: ‘He didn’t need to be there. What he was doing was looking at how the track performs when there are trains going over it. A drone could do that as well, if not better, than the human eye.’

Asked if the RMT was effectively putting the lives of railway workers at risk, he replied: ‘Absolutely.’

He also claimed dashboard cameras had been fitted inside Network Rail’s huge fleet of repair vans but, farcically, the RMT will not allow them to be turned on. ‘A colleague died in a road traffic accident in February while driving a Network Rail vehicle,’ he added. ‘We have no camera footage to share with his family or the coroner to help explain that cause of death because the RMT blocks turning the cameras on.’

Talks between Network Rail and the RMT will resume tomorrow, and Mr Haines said he has permission from the Government to offer workers a bigger pay rise than the 3 per cent handed to NHS staff south of the Border last year. Crucially, the package must be funded from cash saved by overhauling Network Rail’s inefficient working practices.

The Government spent £16billion bailing out the railways when passenger numbers collapsed during the pandemic. They are still at only 75 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, leaving the network with a £2billion funding black hole and a desperate need to find savings.

‘The railway faces a massive financial crisis,’ said Mr Haines. ‘It would be a gross act of negligence if we didn’t make the railway more affordable as a result of this.’

In his office perched above Waterloo Station, he described last week’s failed talks as ‘hugely frustrating’ and claimed his negotiators had ‘very, very little face time’ with RMT officials. ‘If you were to accumulate the number of hours their representatives have been on the TV, it is an order of magnitude more than they have spent talking to us,’ he said.

Mr Haines has reached the conclusion that the RMT is ‘not looking to resolve this dispute’, adding: ‘It felt like we were getting close on Sunday, again on Monday, and then they walked out on largely spurious pretences.’

With patience wearing thin, Net

The union has been obstructing new safety technology for years

work Rail is threatening to press on with its modernisation plans and make a pay offer directly to staff.

Mr Haines accepted ‘it’s always an Exocet to try and bypass the trade unions’ but in the face of RMT ‘intransigence’, there may be no other way.

Normally unflappable, Mr Haines became angry when asked about Mr Lynch’s assertion that rail workers are fighting a class struggle.

‘I can match Mick Lynch inch for inch for working-class credentials,’ said Mr Haines, the son of a Hoover washing machine factory worker father and WH Smith cashier mother who grew up in a terraced house in Merthyr Tydfil. ‘This is not about class war. This is about whether or not we want to go back to the 1970s, which the RMT have said they expressly want to.’

On the wall is a huge timetable of the train service from Merthyr Tydfil train station in 1952, a present from Network Rail’s chairman Peter Hendy.

‘I was the only one of my family to go to university,’ said Mr Haines. ‘My brother is a PC in the valleys of South Wales. To portray this as some sort of fight against the working man is just deeply dishonest and fundamentally wrong.

‘I am very, very proud of my background. I am very proud of my parents’ working ethos. They were still factory workers and shop workers when they retired.’

Mr Lynch has previously declared he is ‘nostalgic’ for the 1970s, when militant union barons could topple governments. The comment mystifies Mr Haines.

‘There is absolutely a role for trade unions and trade unionists, but it’s not in the way that they had the stranglehold in the 1970s,’ he said.

‘Give me a single example of a flourishing industry or sector of our economy that has grown because the trade unions had a stranglehold over it. There isn’t one.’