Opinion: Rest day agreements to get Northern back on track

What to do with Northern? Government nationalised it in 2020 because of poor performance. Almost five years on, the operator is under fire from local politicians for… poor performance.

The latest crisis came to a head on October 30, when Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham chaired a meeting of the Rail North Committee (part of Transport for the North).

Just that morning, Burnham said Northern had cancelled 155 trains. And he was speaking a little after 0830, so there hadn’t been much morning.

Northern Managing Director Tricia Williams explained that the company had no rest day working agreement with drivers in the ASLEF union. This makes it hard for the company to cover short-notice absences. She also said it had no agreement with conductors west of the Pennines to work on Sundays. Northern relies on Sunday volunteers.

Two days later, ASLEF told me it had agreed a three-year rest day working agreement with Northern. Agreement had come the day after the meeting, it said.

Northern told me that discussions were continuing. After some more digging, it seems that both are right.

Negotiating teams have done a deal, but it’s still to be ratified by ASLEF’s executive committee as far as I can tell. But the fact that the union confirmed the deal before its EC met suggests that Northern has secured one of the keys it needs to unlock better performance.

Sitting behind some of its cancellations is a high sickness rate. Williams said that mental health was the highest cause of sickness which, overall, varies between around 3% in some depots to up to 11% in others.

The result has led to Northern issuing ‘do not travel’ warnings for Sundays, which Burnham and the other politicians on the committee thought unacceptable.

To give some perspective on the Sunday problem, I checked Northern services through Preston on October 27.

It planned 105 services, which was fewer than normal because buses replaced trains between Preston and Colne for engineering works.

Northern ‘pre-cancelled’ 31 services through Preston that Sunday, removing them from the timetable uploaded into railway systems the night before.

The operator told the Rail North Committee (RNC) that it pre-cancels trains when it knows it will not have crews for them. For a Sunday in north-west England, this will largely be the result of not having conductors volunteering for work.

Northern cancelled another four services on the Sunday itself for lack of conductors, and one because it had no driver. There were another two cancellations with the cause given as “late inward working”. It’s likely these inward workings did not run for lacking conductors.

So, broadly speaking, Northern cancelled a third of trains through Preston on October 27 because it did not have conductors to work them.

In the RNC meeting, West Yorkshire Mayor Tracy Brabin highlighted cancellations on the Calder Valley cross-Pennine route, citing Wednesday October 23’s cancellation of 13 trains after 1700. She claimed this was harming the economy, and raised concerns that Northern would discourage people later in the year from visiting Christmas markets such the one in Halifax’s Piece Hall.

I looked at trains through Hebden Bridge for the day, and indeed it had 13 cancellations after 1700. That’s a quarter of the 53 services planned.

Nine were coded ‘TG’ - no driver. Two were ‘TH’ - no guard. And two were ‘YI’ - late inward service. A bit more digging showed that both these inward services were cancelled - one for having no driver and one for no guard.

With a rest day working agreement now in place with drivers, this sort of disruption should end, which I hope gives politicians such as Brabin some assurance over Christmas markets.

Money is likely needed to solve the Sunday problem with conductors. This could be by bringing Sundays into the rostered week just as with any other day, which might mean an overall increase in numbers, increasing the wage bill. Or it might mean making Sundays compulsory rostered overtime, which will need a suitable rate agreed with the RMT. That too increases costs.

Set against these higher costs, it’s reasonable to assume that Northern’s revenue will rise as services become more reliable and attractive to passengers.

The balance of costs and revenue weighs on taxpayers because Northern is an overall recipient of subsidy from government. Put another way, the government buys rail services in northern England for the region’s overall economic good. And just as passengers want value for money from their ticket prices, so does government want value for the subsidy it injects.

You could be forgiven for missing all of this in wider reports of the meeting, which centred on Burnham’s incredulity that Northern still used fax machines to send information to train crews.

“Northern needs better than an unreliable, fax-driven railway,” he said.

It does, but I can’t see that removing fax machines will prompt a great leap forward in punctuality.

Faxes are machines that scan a sheet of paper, sending it electronically down a phone line to a receiving machine that prints the results. They were overtaken by email in the early 2000s.

Today, Northern says it uses emails for conductors, but has no agreement with drivers to use other than faxes. This makes drivers appear Luddites.

I suspect most drivers don’t care how their diagram information reaches them. But what does matter is that it’s on paper.

Why? Because drivers cannot have electronic devices such as tablets or mobile phones switched on in their cabs. Companies fear they would be distracted by them, and I daresay drivers wouldn’t want them bleeping in the background anyway.

They could be switched into ‘airplane mode’, merely to display information. Yet there’s a simplicity to a sheet of paper that can be folded into a pocket and fished out quickly when required. You can add notes easily or highlight something unusual.

So, whether Northern uses faxes or not is a storm in a teacup. Perhaps it should move to something else - maybe remote networked printers in depots? But don’t pretend this will sharply improve performance.

What the fax fuss shows is that the railway makes easy its portrayal by critics as backward. In this case, it has also deflected attention from the real problems that need to be solved, including mental health.

It’s vital that Northern and other train operators bring Sundays properly into the working week. We need a reliable railway, seven days a week. No business can be successful if it relies on volunteers to deliver its core product.