Rail (ASLEF) Strike Calendar

Mick Whelan, ASLEF's general secretary, said: 'The company's failure to act responsibly has impacts not just for rail workers and passengers at Hull Trains but right across the wider rail industry. 'We have a culture on the railway designed to keep everyone safe. Anyone who works on the railway should be able to report a safety concern without fearing they will be penalised, punished, or lose their livelihood.'

Updated 26/02/2025: following a revised proposal from the company, ASLEF's executive committee has accepted their offer and all strike dates are now cancelled.

Planned strikes on the London Underground have been suspended following talks over pay between the Aslef union and Transport for London (TfL). Industrial action was due to begin on Thursday and a walkout was also planned for next Tuesday. Aslef said it had been given a "significantly improved" pay offer by London Underground management and it would discuss that offer with union members on Thursday. Claire Mann, from TfL, said: “We believe we have made an offer to our trade unions that is fair, affordable, good for our colleagues and good for London and we urge our trade unions to continue working with us.”

ASLEF members have voted to end their two-year pay dispute with a strong YES vote to accept the offer made by the Department of Transport in August.

Mick Whelan, general secretary, commented to the media: 'It just shows what can be done when the grown-ups come into the room. The Tory government sat on their hands and refused to talk to us. But this Labour government has worked with us to resolve this dispute. 'The offer is a fair offer and it is what we have always asked for, a clean offer, without a land grab for our terms & conditions. We achieved more in the first four weeks of a Labour government than we managed under a Tory government that set out to destroy us.'

Strike action due to take place at weekends between the end of August and mid November 2024 has been suspended. Drivers working at LNER were due to strike after a long dispute with the company which saw existing agreements broken by the employer.

ASLEF members have consistently worked to negotiate with the company and explain why the breaking of agreements is unacceptable but the company continued to operate inappropriately, including paying driver managers a premium to drive trains, not recruiting enough drivers to run a full service, and trying to push drivers to work outside of agreed rostering systems. The railway is a safety critical environment and procedures are in place to ensure safe operation. ASLEF had raised safety concerns regarding driver managers ‘dual-rolling’ ie driving trains when they should have been available for on-call duties in the case of any incidents.

Train drivers at LNER, the train company which runs the passenger service on the East Coast main line between London and Edinburgh, will walk out on strike on every Saturday between 31 August and 9 November [inclusive] and on every Sunday from 1 September to 10 November [inclusive].

This follows a breakdown in industrial relations, bullying by management, and persistent breaking of agreements by the company. It is an entirely separate dispute from the national pay dispute, with 16 train companies, which was, we hope, resolved on Wednesday when we received a pay offer from the DfT which is being put to 13,000 members with a recommendation to accept.

Nigel Roebuck, ASLEF’s full-time officer in the north-east of England, who leads on negotiations with LNER, said: ‘This dispute started nigh-on two years ago with our members complaining about consistently being badgered for “favours” by managers outside of rostering agreements and being contacted remotely which is also against our agreements. ‘The bottom line is that LNER does not employ enough drivers to deliver the services it has promised passengers, and the government, it will run. This TOC’s legacy of under-established depots means it has always relied on favours and goodwill and, when that evaporated, they started to try to bully our members, and then to break out agreements.

Aslef say drivers have not had a pay rise for five years, since their last pay deals expired in 2019. The union said that after its members voted overwhelmingly in February to continue industrial action, it asked the train operating companies to hold talks.

General secretary Mick Whelan described the year-old offer of a 4% pay rise followed by a second 4% increase as "risible" and "dead in the water"

We haven’t heard from Mr Harper, Mr Merriman, the RDG, or the TOCs since those new mandates were announced four weeks ago. In fact, Mr Harper hasn’t deigned to talk to us since December 2022; Mr Merriman hasn’t talked to us since January 2023; and the RDG has not seen fit to join us in the room since April last year. We have given the government every opportunity to come to the table but it is now clear they do not want to resolve this dispute.

Many members have now not had a single penny increase in pay for half a decade, during which time inflation has soared and, with it, the cost of living. We didn’t ask for an increase during the pandemic, when we worked through lockdown, as key workers, risking our lives, to move goods around the country and enable NHS and other workers to get to work.

LNER has used managers – paid £500 a shift – to drive trains on strike days and, after the expiry of the last non-contractual overtime agreement, on most days of the week now. There is no agreement in place for management to drive services on main line infrastructure. It results in branch line services – such as Lincoln, Skipton, and Harrogate – being cancelled because of a lack of route knowledge and means virtually no driver training is being done.

The dispute at Northern centres around management failing to adhere to procedures and agreements on a variety of subjects including bullying, intimidation, and gaslighting of union reps and the subsequent cover-ups of investigations into this. Drivers are fed up with the draconian approach being taken by the company.

"We have given the government every opportunity to come to the table but it has now been a year since we had any contact from the Department for Transport. It's clear they do not want to resolve this dispute.

"The government has now tried their old trick of changing the rules when they can't win and brought in Minimum Service Levels legislation. But this new law, as we told officials during the consultation period, won't ease industrial strife. It will likely just make it worse.

Mick Whelan, Aslef's general secretary, said the union was "in this for the long haul". "Our members - who have not had a pay rise for nearly five years now - are determined that the train companies - and the Tory government that stands behind them - do the right thing," he added.

The day after Transport Secretary Mark Harper disingenuously told the Transport Select Committee [on Wednesday 15 November] that ASLEF should put the RDG’s April offer – which Mr Harper forgot to mention has already been rejected so is not ‘on the table’ – to members ASLEF has announced a rolling programme of one-day strikes and a nine-day overtime ban to ratchet up the pressure on the 16 train companies – and the Tory government that stands behind them – to give train drivers who have not had an increase in salary for four-and-a-half years the pay rise they deserve.

Train drivers at more than a dozen companies will strike on Friday, 1 September and refuse to work overtime on Saturday, 2 September, their union Aslef has said.

• After a week of negotiations at ACAS, the ASLEF Executive Committee have agreed to suspend planned industrial action on the London Underground.
• ASLEF's organiser on the Underground, Finn Brennan, stated that they have made progress in protecting members' working conditions and pensions from government cuts.
• There will be no changes to pension benefits before the next general election.
• Any future changes to working conditions and agreements will only be made through negotiation.
• According to Brennan, this is a significant step forward.

ASLEF members at these train companies have been in dispute for almost a year over the failure of management to offer a fair deal on pay. Most of the drivers have not had a pay increase at all since 2019 and with inflation still well over 10% and the cost of living spiralling, this is not acceptable.

Drivers won't accept modernisation forced upon them with no compensation, and they won't accept a return to draconian Victorian conditions or being expected to work harder, for longer, for less. All workers deserve better than that.

Tube train drivers voted by 99%, on a turnout of 77%, in favor of a walk out, the union said.

Mr Brennan, the union's organiser on London Underground, said its members were not prepared to put up with "threats" to working conditions and pensions.

"We understand that TfL faces financial challenges, post-pandemic, but our members are simply not prepared to pay the price for the government's failure to properly fund London's public transport system," he said.

• Drivers had been offered a 4% pay rise for two years in a row earlier this month in a bid to end a long-running dispute over pay and conditions.
• The pay deal hinged on several changes to working practices.
• Aslef said the proposal was "not and could not ever be acceptable", but its general secretary Mick Whelan said the union was open to further talks.
• The two new strike dates will affect 15 train companies. Aslef members have staged action on six previous occasions, causing huge disruption to services, with some operators unable to run any trains.
• The RMT union, which also represents a few hundred train drivers, confirmed its members at 14 companies would also strike on the same dates in February, although it will only make a marginal difference to the level of disruption.
• The RMT strike will affect many of the same train companies hit by the Aslef walkout, but also include c2c and Island Line.
• RMT general secretary Mick Lynch said negotiations would continue with the rail operators "to create a package on jobs, conditions and pay that can be offered to our members".
• The offer, the first in the dispute to be made by the Rail Delivery Group (RDG), which represents train companies, would have seen drivers get a backdated pay rise of 4% for 2022 and a 4% increase this year.
• The RDG had said the deal would have seen the average salary for a driver increase from £60,000 per year to £65,000 by the end of 2023. Ten years ago it was £44,985.
• The Department for Transport called Aslef's rejection "incredibly disappointing", and said passengers had "borne the brunt of these damaging strikes for far too long".