Silverlink stations on the Bakerloo line (Queen’s Park to Harrow & Wealdstone) and the District line (Kew and Gunnersbury) are to transfer to LUL, as are Silverlink platforms at Blackhorse Road, Highbury & Islington and West Brompton. RMT welcomes this, as Tube services run through these stations and it brings a few small parts of the privatised mainline railway back into public hands.

Silverlink station staff will become LUL employees, with a big improvement in their pay and conditions. But LUL has plans for the transfer which should alarm us all. The company intends to:

• use at least 20 staff from an agency called ‘The Train People’ to work as reserves during the ‘transition period’;
• use security guards from ‘Capes UK’ on stations after the evening peak and overnight;
• delay the new staff’s move onto LUL pay and conditions;
• have the stations maintained by private company Taylor Woodrow, with its own fault reporting line, outside the existing PPP arrangements.

LUL is using this small renationalisation as a pretext to import bad practices from the private railway onto the public railway. Use of agency and security staff casualises and fragments the workforce – and if LUL gets away with it in this situation, it will be looking for other opportunities to use agency and security staff again on our stations.

Although the transfer is due to go ahead on 11th November, LUL seems ill-prepared, partly due to lack of co-operation from Silverlink.

Your union reps are attending meetings with management to discuss all these issues and more – rosters, upgrading of LUL Supervisors, etc. But it may take more than talking, so please support your union’s campaign to ensure that both new and existing staff get their rights, and to stop the use of agency and security staff.

You can get more information from Stations & Revenue Council RMT reps Janine Booth and Jason Humphreys or from Wembley Central group local rep Patricia McDaid.