The following letter was sent to On The Move. It was not published, so we re-print it here. (Update: It was eventually printed in a later issue.)

Anyone reading the article ‘Silver Service’ in the last On The Move would think that the ex-Silverlink employees on the Bakerloo and District lines are now working in paradise. However, this is far from the truth.

These staff are still on their old rates of pay, in many cases thousands of pounds per year less than other LUL employees doing exactly the same jobs. LUL has not given the ticket sellers the right training or equipment to deal with all Oyster problems, so they are regularly confronted by angry and aggressive customers. They are working alongside agency staff who would much rather have permanent jobs but are stuck in low-paid agency work without the job security, sick pay, holiday pay and other conditions that the rest of us have. Instead of a station supervisor on duty at night, the stations have security guards (working 48+ hours per week for £7.50 per hour) - but this has not prevented incidents such as a robbery at knifepoint at Gunnersbury station.

On top of all this, LUL seems to think that it can use these stations as guinea pigs for testing out staff-cutting and safety-compromising ideas for ‘wider roll-out’ (as one of the company's own documents put it).

As well as using agency staff and security guards, LUL is considering the idea of ‘mobile station supervision’. Instead of a station supervisor on duty on each station, a supervisor would cover several stations at once. Woe betide the customers, or the driver, or service control, if an incident (eg. one-under, security alert, assault) occurs at one station while the station supervisor is far away at another one.

I could congratulate you on a well-spun PR article, but it was actually a travesty of the truth.

Janine Booth, RMT rep,Stations & Revenue Council