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Relying on staff volunteering to work weekend shifts to keep trains running on Sundays, as well as the regular need to return to voluntary overtime to cover the absences, it was broken as no sustainable for a healthy, functioning railway in UK.
Transport expert Graham Eccles, who spent his career as managing director of South West Trains before being appointed head of rail at Stagecoach, said The Independent that relying on overtime “is not the way to start a railway” and has always been outdated.
“We don’t have enough people to cover that train [service] seven days a week, and that can’t be right, and it never has been right,” he said.
Work on Sunday is also a working day for train drivers and other railway staff has long been a polarizing issue in the industrycausing widespread disruption in recent years. Last week on Great Western Railway, for example, the effects of Storm Darragh were compounded by dozens of cancellations as staff refused – as is their right – to work on their day off.
Train managers working for Avanti West Coast who are members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union has announced industrial action around Christmas for “inadequate proposals on working day schedules” after rejecting a proposal put to them by the company – although in better news for passengers, strikes were called on December 13 after the union received an improved offer from Avanti.
The Sunday rule varies between companies, with some operators relying on employees who volunteer to work additional paid shifts to perform scheduled services on Sundays, as this day is commonly negotiated to be “outside” of the industry work week.
Voluntary overtime is different, such as working on a day of rest, and is used by rail operators to cover absences due to vacancies, illness or when staff are required to undergo more than normal levels of training, such as new fleet introductions or major changes timetable.
State-owned company Northern regularly advises passengers in north-west England not to travel on some routes on Sundays. While Sunday is ‘within’ the working week for staff east of the Pennines; for those in depots west of the Pennines, it is optional.
Simon Calder, Travel Correspondent The Independenthe warned in his Christmas overview of public transport: “On rail operators including Great Western Railway and Northern, expect a significant number of cancellations due to staff shortages on 22 and 29 December. Not all railway staff working for these firms need to work on Sundays, and it is likely that many of them would rather spend time with their families than work overtime.”
Although some operators have candidly admitted that they sometimes rely on workers picking up extra shifts to cover their full schedules, the roll-out of the new system, which would mean a more reliable network for passengers, has been slow.
Because of the way Sundays work in the rail world, rail services can often be without reliable power to operate trains at weekends, around Christmas and New Year or during special events. Hundreds of train services across the country Britain were canceled at short notice on Sunday that England played Spain in the Euro 2024 final, as many workers chose to spend their free time watching the game instead of picking up extra work.
At the time, Great Western Railway (GWR) admitted the “optional weekly” agreement was the reason for the mass cancellations.
The operator said that “illness and England reaching the Euro finals are likely to reduce the number of colleagues available for overtime”.
Mick Whelan, general secretary of Aslef, the train drivers’ union, said The Independent: “Rail companies are not employing enough drivers to deliver the service they promise to passengers and the government will.”
“It is a consequence of 30 years of privatization during which companies looted the public coffers to make private profits at public expense.
“And that’s why the new Labor government is putting Britain’s railways back where they belong – in the public sector. If companies hired more drivers – enough drivers – they wouldn’t have to cancel service.
“The railway should not run overtime – which is voluntary, of course.”
Rail veteran Mr Eccles said that from a passenger’s perspective, train tickets have gone up in price, and nobody enjoys having their train canceled on top of that, but the reality is that train staff will not just provide a full seven-day service out of their own “good will”.
He believes that the improvement in wages since the introduction of privatization has taken away the incentive for train drivers to accept overtime because some of them no longer need the extra money. He also believes that other factors, including a general sense of work-life balance post-isolation, also contributed to not feeling the urge to take on extra shifts.
“To get from where the railway is today to where it needs to be, to have that seven-day railway, it will take several years and a lot of money, and the government has to make that decision whether to spend that money to get to where would like to be,” added Mr Eccles.
It was said in the Ministry of Transport The Independent that it was committed to “resetting railway industrial relations” and “overhauling” the railways to modernize working practices such as less reliance on overtime.
“Our immediate priority is to reset labor relations and put passengers first.”
Louise Haigh, who was transport secretary until her resignation in early December, called for a seven-day working week for the railways.
“Obviously we want to bring the railways to a seven-day week, we want to make sure that we have state-of-the-art practices and that they are fit for Great Britain’s 21st century railways,” she said Standard.
Finalizing the deal with the unions on the day off was not easy, with an agreement between the RMT and Northern collapsing in November.
Northern said RMT members rejected an improved offer of four months’ pay for conductors to work on Sundays during the recent referendum vote – an offer that would have seen them double the money they get for working on Sundays.
Small changes are underway, such as the Great Western Railway moving newly hired drivers onto contracts that included a weekly duty in 2018.
However, “without further union agreement this will take some time [the] the entire driver population,” he admitted, adding that “in line with most of the rail industry, we rely on paid overtime.”
The rail company added that this was not a case of understaffing, but that employers’ contracts contained terms and conditions that meant GWR “relies on a number of colleagues who volunteer to work overtime to cover our Sunday timetable”.
ScotRail said it currently employs 160 drivers each year – the most of any UK operator.
“This will progressively reduce reliance on day off work,” they added.
A spokesman for the Rail Delivery Group, which represents rail companies across the UK, said: “Staff will sometimes be required to work overtime, particularly at weekends.
“Rail companies are always looking to attract new people to the industry and operators are working tirelessly to recruit and train as many staff as possible.”
“We know how important reliability and accuracy are to customers. On a typical working day, our staff are deployed across the railways to meet a national timetable of over 21,000 trains a day during the week.”
For more travel news and tips, listen to Simon Calder’s podcast