In December, RMT revealed plans by London Underground management to close 144 ticket offices with the loss of 1,200 jobs. Your union can now reveal the company’s latest attempt to cut jobs: in a leaked report headed ‘Minimum Staffing Levels’, management plan to reduce station staffing numbers to a bare minimum. These particular plans relate to sub-surface stations, but open section stations are also set for wholesale de-staffing.

The report offers examples of how LU aims to reduce staffing levels including a comparison between London Bridge and Victoria stations. Presently, London Bridge has a minimum of 4 staff all day. Victoria runs at a minimum of 12 (morning peak). LU proposes to reduce Victoria’s minimum staffing numbers to 4 all day - with a potential loss of 8 jobs.

LU plans to generalise this approach across 116 stations, of which they want 70 run at a minimum of 2 staff with a further 46 stations still to be ‘assessed‘. This could mean cuts of up to two-thirds of positions in sub-surface stations resulting in hundreds of job losses.

Management are also considering allowing stations to run a 'degraded service' with even fewer staff. They suggest that it is possible to keep Victoria station open with the Victoria line non-stopping with just two staff on duty! (Victoria is London Underground’s busiest station, with 76 million passenger visits a year.)
Minimum staffing levels were first introduced after the King’s Cross fire in 1987 that claimed 31 lives. After much debate in Parliament and London Transport, legal regulations (‘Section 12’) were adopted in 1989, with stringent and wide-ranging fire-fighting and precaution measures, including around 1,700 extra staff. RMT recently successfully defended these 1989 Regulations against attempts to scrap them.

But while the Section 12 Regulations give a legal minimum of two staff, London Underground has higher minimum levels for all but the simplest stations. It is now threatening to slash these.

The effectiveness of minimum numbers is shown by the record on London Underground since the 1987 fire. Never since have we had a repeat of that tragic event. During the London bombings in July 2005, the 1989 measures were critical in ensuring that no fires compounded the tragedy on that day. Staff on the day were hailed as ‘heroes’ for the role we played in saving lives and getting London moving again.

All that seems to be forgotten just five years on. Now London Underground aims to ‘standardise the approach for determining minimum staffing levels’, by which it means cutting staffing levels to the bone.