Railway bosses are preparing to cancel thousands of trains across Britain during strike action next week that is expected to cripple services, as they warned that the dispute will cost the cash-strapped industry as much as £150mn.
The RMT union has announced plans for 40,000 workers to strike across both infrastructure manager Network Rail and 13 train operating companies on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday in protest over pay and potential job cuts, the most significant industrial action to hit the railways in 30 years.
Andrew Haines, chief executive of Network Rail, played down the chances of coming to an agreement to stop the strike, and warned that the industrial action represented a “high stakes gamble” from the union which would deepen the industry’s financial problems.
Network Rail on Wednesday outlined plans to run only about 4,500 of the normal 20,000 daily trains on strike days, and to shut thousands of miles of track across swaths of the country.
Trains will also only run for 11 hours per day, between 7.30am and 6.30pm, and passengers have been urged to only travel if necessary.
Large parts of the railway network will be closed completely, including most of Scotland and Wales, while services in England will not run west of Plymouth or on many branch lines.
The last trains to London will leave as early as 13.30 from Edinburgh, 14.45 from Manchester and 15.50 from Birmingham.
Some operators including Northern and South Eastern have urged passengers not to try to travel, and disruption is expected to last all week as trains will be out of place at the end of the strike days.
RMT workers on London Underground also plan to strike on Tuesday, while the TSSA union on Tuesday announced plans to ballot its members over industrial action at three more train operators, bringing the total to seven, as well as Network Rail staff. The earliest those strikes could begin is late July.
Haines said the talks with the RMT “have not progressed as far as I had hoped” and that he was “not wildly optimistic” on reaching an agreement.
The week’s disruption will cost the industry between £100mn and £150mn through a combination of lost ticket sales and delayed engineering work, which would leave less money on the table for pay rises for RMT staff, he said.
“Once we have taken the pain of next week we will have around £150mn less money available to us as a system. The Treasury will either have to decide to fund that . . . or we will have to make more savings,” Haines said.
The RMT wrote to ministers on Wednesday to demand a meeting with transport secretary Grant Shapps and chancellor Rishi Sunak over the dispute, as they said the Treasury “is calling the shots” in the pay offers being put forward by Network Rail and the train companies.
The industry, which was effectively nationalised at the start of the pandemic and has received about £16bn in taxpayer support over the past two years, will be unable to offer a pay rise anywhere near inflation, but can go beyond the public sector pay cap of 2 per cent if it can produce efficiency savings, Haines said.
He said he was “deeply frustrated” by union refusal to accept modernisation and changes to working practices, such as using drones to monitor tracks or digital technology to check trackside voltages rather than sending staff on to the lines.
About 2,000 staff have left Network Rail over the past two years, including 1,500 through a voluntary severance programme, and the public body is aiming to cut the same number of jobs again, which it believes can be achieved through more severance packages rather than compulsory redundancy.
