UK: TransPennine Express Managing Director Chris Jackson says good progress is being with tackling the operator’s backlog of driver training, which was a key issue behind the service reductions brought in with the December 2023 timetable. However, it will not be completed until next year.
‘This is one of the reasons why we have the Rest Day Working agreement with ASLEF in place until March 2025’, he told Rail Business UK in August. ‘We have delivered 20 000 driver training days in the last 18 months and the requirement is down to a more manageable level, although we have still got a bit of a way to go.’
Jackson praised the collaborative attitude of drivers’ union ASLEF, explaining that ‘we are reliant on RDW, everyone knows that, and we will be until the early part of 2025’. He would like a longer-term RDW agreement ‘because I think it’s the right thing to have, to protect the business in the long run. However, in the future I would expect that we wouldn’t need to use it as much as we are now, because the volume of training would be significantly less.’
Jackson is keen to dispel suggestions that TPE is short of staff, saying ‘we are in a very healthy place; we have enough drivers to operate the train plan and we have enough conductors. Some of the issues that we found when we came in were firstly a backlog of driver training, secondly our operation was overly complicated and we’ve simplified, and thirdly we have very restrictive driver terms and conditions, some of the most restrictive in the industry. We can’t deploy drivers as flexibly as we would like within their working day.
‘That is a barrier to us improving performance even further and that’s why I would dearly love to get in a room with ASLEF, get a mandate to negotiate and have sensible productivity discussions. It’s a bit of a glass ceiling and I think we could improve cancellations by a further 2% by negotiating on some of these very restrictive T&Cs.’
‘We get to pick the best person for the job’
Jackson says TPE has recruited more than 300 people since moving to the Department for Transport’s Operator of Last Resort.
‘Some of that is churn to replace staff leaving, but we have expanded because we identified that there was a need to increase staff in control, in front line roles and in the safety team.’
There have been big strides in female representation, which now stands at 24% of workforce, and ‘there is still a long way to go’ but ‘it is an improving statistic’.
The highest female representation is in its engineering team where to Fleet, Safety & Service Delivery Director Paul Staples reported ‘50% of our senior managers are female and we are seeing improved diversity as well’. This is the result of ‘better advertising of positions in recruitment, so we get to pick the best person for the job’.
