In defence of the train drivers - Interview with Mick Whelan

After two years of strike action, ASLEF struck a deal with the new government in September. For Mick Whelan, it was just another chapter in his fight for his members. RICHARD WILCOCK speaks to the union chief

On the day that RAIL meets Mick Whelan, it’s during a particularly chilly cold snap. A story has broken in the national press about train drivers refusing to walk to their cabs at Edge Hill depot, because the paths to the trains have not been cleared of snow.

“The snow story is one of those where it is easy to paint it as an example of Spanish practices,” says Whelan, the general secretary of train drivers’ union ASLEF.

“The reality is that it is very basic safety. The paths are dangerous, and we advised that until they were cleared, don’t walk on them. What’s the story?”

When the topic of Spanish practices (long-standing but otherwise irregular customs) was brought up, Whelan had asked me to name one.

Of course, when I mentioned walking from one end of the platform to another (to change ends, or to check for possible hazards or obstructions), he gave a very impassioned defence of drivers having multiple exercises and jobs to finish - which is very true.

Train drivers, Whelan argues, are “monitored for every second” - from the time they book on, check speed restrictions, late notices, and get the cab ready for departure. Those seconds includes walking time.

Whelan goes on to explain why time is fixed for drivers to change ends, with a passion that is as combative as it is caring.

“If you take a train into a terminus station, they give you time to shut down the desk, a certain number of minutes to walk to the other end, more minutes to set up at the other end, and get ready for departure. All of that could not happen unless there is a timetable.”

There are many issues within the industry that in some way land on the desk of Mick Whelan, or at least on which he is expected to have an opinion. Open Access is one of them.

“No wonder they can invest in new trains - they’ve spent a quarter of a century not paying the rent,” Whelan tells me.

He believes that Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander’s letter to open access operators was a way of resetting the imbalance, rather than trying to usher the concept into an early demise (RAIL 1027).

“All she is trying to do is get the operators to pay the same because they are using the same, and taking the revenue away from other operators. I don’t think many people want to go to London from Stirling, but they will further down the line. So, abstraction is a very real issue.”

For many, trade union chiefs are the bogeymen of the industry - disrupting, difficult and demanding. But they are also (to many) the defenders of industries which are often attacked from all sides.

Mick Whelan, it must be said, is a staunch defender of the rail industry, and particularly train drivers. Of course, you’d expect nothing less from the leader of the train drivers’ union.

He started his career in rail almost accidentally.

He originally worked for several years in banking, having achieved his qualifications in the sector.

After a brief sojourn around Europe for several months with some friends, Whelan found himself back in London. He was given an ultimatum by his mother to go back into education or go to work.

So, he found himself in a British Rail office. He was put on a guard’s course with the carrot that he would move over to the clerical side after six weeks.

After six weeks, that carrot had seemingly disappeared, and in 1988 he found himself becoming a train driver through a fast-track scheme, which some experienced train drivers had coined graduates of “boil-in-the-bags”.

Whelan laughs at this and quickly points out that he is the “most senior boil-in-the-bag in the country now”.

But it’s clear, even for somebody who fell into the profession, that workers’ rights and the welfare of drivers will form part of his legacy once he retires, which by Whelan’s own admission is likely to be next year.

This fight, though, has rarely been more intense than over the past few years. As has been well publicised by much of the national press, train drivers have apparently just had an “inflation-busting” pay rise.

In August 2024, ASLEF ended a period of strike action which had begun in July 2022, by accepting a pay deal whereby members accepted an offer that included a 5% backdated pay rise for 2022-23, a 4.75% rise for 2023-24, and a 4.5% increase for 2024-25. It has the potential for some drivers’ pay to approach close to £60,000 in some places - particularly London.

For some of the public, that is unpalatable for people who just ‘press some buttons’. But Whelan is quick to point out that the public perception of train drivers is not just down to how much a train driver is paid.

“We do surveys regularly, and a good percentage of people will say they want cheaper prices, cleaner trains and more efficiency. They’ll also broadly agree with the conditions that we’ve set out. But if you ask about strikes, they’ll also say they don’t agree with them.

“And you must remember, the last strikes were over a unique part of our social history - a pandemic. Almost every household had somebody on strike or knew somebody on strike, so after a while, those opinions are going to shift.”

COVID and the pandemic was a time of shifting sands underneath both the industry and the country at large. People who had relied on train travel, and resented the growing cost of it, were unshackled.

For Whelan, the cost of travelling by train had clouded the judgment on the train driver strikes.

“By the end of the strikes, the opinion ratings were far lower. But that also tied in with rocketing travel costs, underperformance, and underinvestment.”

In which case, Whelan agrees that for the tabloids, train drivers were easy pickings.

During the strikes, it seemed that Whelan was acutely aware of who he was dealing with. The previous government had constantly jousted with both Whelan and his RMT counterpart Mick Lynch, arguing that productivity and efficiency had to return to the railways before a deal could be struck.

ASLEF claimed that to agree the then-government’s offer, they had to surrender their powers for collective bargaining in the future. Against that backdrop, Whelan believes that the narrative was easily controlled.

“People were told relentlessly that the pay cheque the government would have to sign to resolve the train drivers strike was £10 billion. That was a lie.

“It was said many times that the pay rise that the train drivers received was equivalent to the cost of the winter fuel allowance. That was also a lie.

“We told the Tory party, and we told the various news outlets - and they chose to ignore it.”

Whelan’s remarks are not without merit. The cost of the train driver pay deal to the government’s coffers was nearly £135 million. The winter fuel allowance, before it was stopped by the Labour government, was nearly £2bn last year.

That did not stop former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak making the comparison in his very first Prime Minister’s Questions as the opposition in September. And it certainly didn’t stop various news outlets reporting incorrect figures at the time.

The strikes, though, had been a long time coming, and in part had been an indictment on the lack of investment in the industry over the years.

Train drivers had not had a pay rise for five years at the start of the strikes, as Whelan frequently points out during the interview. And privatisation had resulted in profits or investment back into the industry stalling.

A report by the RMT released last year showed that nearly £1.5bn leaves British railways each year through profit extraction.

The original discussions had included tense conversations around productivity, which Whelan admits were “difficult”. However, he has said before that part of the issue was that the Department for Transport didn’t understand the fundamentals.

He cites about a PowerPoint presentation that the previous government had presented to ASLEF during the discussions, regarding a 35-hour week.

“They said some companies were not doing 35-hour weeks and showed us a slideshow of where that was the case. However, this was in part to do with the flexibility in the schedules that they wanted. When the railways were privatised, they wanted five or six-hour turns, up to 11-hour turns.

“The trouble is some drivers do a four-day week. If you have four five-hour turns in one week, that’s 20. So, that is reflected in the data.

“They also didn’t understand that if somebody was covering leave, the cover turns would have to come from the longer turns - meaning that the more you use the more productive and shorter turns, the less you achieve the 35-hour week.

“But that’s what they wanted. That’s the flexibility they wanted. You can’t get that time back. You can only have one driver on one seat in one train at any time. The solution we offered was to remove shorter turns, but they didn’t want to do that.”

Towards the end of the negotiations with the previous government, overcoming issues with terms and conditions led to a “dogmatic political dispute”, according to Whelan.

The talks were irretrievable, and Whelan believes that the government allowed the issue to drift along with any wider reforms that it had in mind.

So, when it came to sitting down with the new Transport Secretary (at the time) Louise Haigh in September, there was very much a sense that the industry and industrial relations would have a reset.

This was, in part, true. But Whelan was not surprised by the pace and sincerity of the negotiations: “They wanted a fundamental reset in relations, and so did we.”

But he adds that it wasn’t simply a case of the DfT walking into the room with big smiles and a blank cheque book. While no terms and conditions were attached, issues remained.

The discussions were mercifully short, however. ASLEF was able to go to a vote with a deal that they could sell to its members… and the new Labour government could show that it meant business about rail reform.

Even so, history has taught us that any deal made with the unions has a knock-on effect, and one area where that could be the case is the impending retirement crunch for train drivers.

The average age currently for a train driver is 48, and a third of the rail workforce in general are in their 50s. The new deal boosts pay and provides a small security in back pay, prompting some to question whether drivers will seek an early retirement after pocketing the new pay deal.

“It is a worry. Not that drivers will suddenly decide to take early retirement, but in general, attracting people to the industry is harder than ever,” Whelan concedes.

“Many would like to think that a driver doesn’t do anything. They don’t even have a steering wheel - anyone can do it. But I think only 60% of people who apply pass the aptitude test. Then there are naturally people who drop out of training, and so forth.”

Whelan points out that he thinks there is also a little bit of a madness attached.

“When you think about it, who wants to drive 300 tonnes of steel at 125mph in the pitch black at four o’clock in the morning?”

Whelan says this with a wry smile, however, recognising that these are exactly the sort of things that train drivers love about their jobs.

But to make the job attractive, and to get the right kind of people into the industry, ASLEF has been advocating (along with Rail Partners and the Rail Safety and Standards Board) a lowering of the age for somebody to become a train driver, from 21 to 18.

This is something which Whelan has long advocated, and which he claims that many in the industry would now like to see.

Lowering the age doesn’t mean that suddenly you’ll have teenagers driving your 1847 Derby- Crewe train, he points out. But it does provide opportunities where previously a generation would be lost.

“The average age of somebody becoming a train driver is 34 years old. Our studies showed that partly stopped women deciding on a career change, and it wasn’t reflective of society. It also meant that we lost school leavers.

“Realistically, they will be training at that age, not driving a train, but it means that the opportunity is there for them. The industry must be more diverse and reflective of the society it serves.”

The future for rail is very much up in the air, with unions likely to play a significant role in Great British Railways. ASLEF and Whelan have not ruled out strikes in future pay talks which could take place as GBR is established.

Standardised contracts, pay scales and rest-day working are all going to feature heavily for unions - and especially ASLEF. And while the new pay deal is welcome, Whelan won’t stop fighting for the union’s members.

“GBR can be good - it can help level the playing field and I will be looking to maximise that for our members. That includes pay, but also change must mean something, and it needs to benefit every one of us.”

On the opportunities that exist, Whelan adds: “The opportunities for the railway to be better is there, but we’re going to go through a period that will define that opportunity.

We’ve made the case for rail - look at Crossrail. The business case is there for HS2 and Crossrail 2. Crossrail will pay for itself in ten years, so it’s a false economy, no matter what it costs to do if we don’t invest.

“What we need is a rolling programme, of ten, 20, 30 years that is consistent. That will be when we realise rail’s potential.”