Train companies are not in the business of telling their passengers not to travel, but that is what Southern rail is doing this week. The company’s trains have no drivers, since they are now on strike. Unless the talks announced late on Tuesday afternoon are successful, the franchise is set to be hit by more industrial action next week, and over the new year, and again for the first full working week of January. Some of those will be walkouts by conductors in the RMT union alone, but others will involve drivers who are members of the RMT or Aslef. What will that be like? If today’s scenes are anything to go by, absolute mayhem: 1,000 drivers on strike, 156 stations rendered temporarily useless and about 600,000 journeys stymied in what transport analysts estimate is the worst rail disruption in two decades.
More than 300,000 passengers will doubtless be hoping for a breakthrough at any talks. Achieving a lasting detente will be a feat indeed. The nub of this dispute is whether Southern trains need guards, but what makes it so hard to resolve is that relations between the unions, Southern’s management and – crucially – the government are now toxic. Witness this week’s claim from transport secretary Chris Grayling that Mick Whelan, Aslef’s head, had “promised 10 years of strikes” – and the response from the normally measured Mr Whelan that the minister was lying and that the breakdown in trust was now total.
This is extraordinary stuff, and it leads to a conclusion that Mr Grayling’s role in this dispute has been utterly counterproductive. The transport secretary is presiding over the biggest rail strike since privatisation in 1994 and, rather than do all he can to resolve it, he appears to be playing the most mischievously political role possible. Such behaviour is of a piece with a man who last week was revealed to have objected to Transport for London taking over suburban rail services, a proposal of the then mayor Boris Johnson, because it could give more power to a Labour mayor. Mr Grayling has a reputation as the sort of politician who, given a choice between playing the man or the ball, would hack at the man every time. No doubt that helps score the odd point, but it will not fix the crisis Britain’s railways are now in.
Make no mistake, Southern is no ordinary franchise. If even at the outset rail was judged a privatisation too far, then Southern’s parent, Govia Thameslink, was definitely a franchise too large. The biggest in the country, it runs the most economically important rail services in the UK – stretching from Peterborough to Brighton, ferrying commuters across the south coast into London Bridge and Victoria, and taking business travellers to Gatwick and Luton airports. Even before these strikes, GTR’s record was lamentable: cancelling more trains than every other rail company in Britain put together. It is also the most botched of all the privatisations. GTR is purely a fee-for-service provider, paid billions by the government for running this apology of a service, which then takes the ticket receipts and even refunds the customers when trains are delayed (which is painfully often). The GTR management team are thus government agents, paid lavishly for their failures.
Such a system exposes GTR to none of the market discipline that John Major promised at the great rail sell-off of 1994. It gives it little incentive to improve and it forces the government to sort any industrial dispute. That is Mr Grayling’s job. Either he does it, or Theresa May should find someone who can.
