A new row has broken out in the battle to secure better working conditions for thousands of Tube cleaners by having them directly employed by Transport for London.
The RMT has called on Sir Sadiq Khan to suspend the process to award a new £700m contract to a private firm after it obtained legal advice suggesting the mayor may have been “misled”.
In recent years, Sir Sadiq has upgraded the pay of Tube cleaners to the London Living Wage – currently £13.85 an hour – and provided them with free travel.
But the RMT says bringing the staff – who clean stations and trains and remove graffiti - back “in house” and directly employed by TfL will mean they get better pensions and improved sick pay rights.
It comes as TfL commissioner Andy Lord urged the four Tube unions – the others are Aslef, Unite and the TSSA – to put a three-year pay offer to their members in a bid to remove the threat of further strikes after a five-day RMT walkout at the start of September.
The offer is for 3.4 per cent for the current financial year followed by increases - matching the RPI rate of inflation in February 2026 and 2027 - for the years 2026/7 and 2027/8.
This could mean that all 16,500 Tube staff see their pay increase by about 10 per cent over the next three years.
Mr Lord told The Standard: “We think it’s a fair, affordable and reasonable offer and we encourage all the unions to take that to their members, and hopefully agree it so we can get certainty for London for the next three years, which would be really good news.
“I’m hopeful and hope we can get that agreed as quickly as possible so we can avoid any further disruption.”
The pay deal does not include any reduction in the 35-hour working week, which was the central demand from the RMT.
The RMT has written to Sir Sadiq and his fellow members of the TfL board in relation to the Tube cleaning contract, which is currently held by the private firm ABM.
The contract was first awarded to ABM in 2017 and has been extended on several occasions and is due to run out next March.
It also covers TfL offices, the Elizabeth line, the London Transport Museum and London Overground stations.
The same cleaners were also required to carry out “covid cleans” and decontamination of trains and stations during the pandemic.
The RMT says that advice it has obtained from barrister Michael Ford KC raises serious concerns about the advice given to the mayor about the procurement process and the ease or difficulty of bringing the contract in-house.
RMT general secretary Eddie Dempsey wrote: “I am concerned that the Mayor may have been misled as to his options in relation to the future of the pan TfL cleaning contract.”
Sir Sadiq is understood to have asked TfL last October to assess whether the contract could be brought “in house”.
According to the RMT, the process was delayed by TfL and only began work in June.
Only two meetings were held before RMT was told in August that the review would not continue, the union said.
“A further meeting was expected to be held but in August, we were informed by the mayor that TfL had told him it was now too late to stop the re-tendering process and that no further contract extension could take place, which might have allowed more time for a genuinely objective options appraisal process,” said Mr Dempsey.
“Advice from King’s Counsel suggests that this guidance was not accurate and that the mayor has been acting under a misunderstanding of the options available to him.
“Our advice is that the contract could be renewed a third time by the same methods as could have been used in the past.”
“This is a major TfL service, employing upwards of 2,000 staff and if it is tendered out it will be a contract worth £700 million over five years.
“These are workers who put their lives on the line during the pandemic and worked every day to make the Underground safe for key workers to travel on.
“Their current treatment under ABM is a continuing stain on the reputation of TfL and the Greater London Authority.
“The cleaners are denied a decent pension in retirement and left to depend on pension credit, denied sick pay and overworked to make up for de-staffing to subsidise ABM’s profits. ABM paid out a £30 million dividend last year to their US owners.”
TfL has been approached for comment.
