No end to train, mail, NHS, driving test and passport chaos

As 2022 comes to a close, at least 1.5 million people have been walking out on strike with railway workers, Royal Mail staff, NHS nurses and driving examiners among those demanding better pay as the cost of living crisis hits.

The action has inevitably made life more difficult for many people in Britain. Whether it’s the struggle to get into work via public transport, be seen in A&E or take a driving test; a growing number of the country’s essential services are no longer working as they are supposed to.

But the disruption extends beyond the strikes and in many cases was there before they began. Both the public and private sectors are grappling with a range of problems brought about by Covid-19, the war in Ukraine and Brexit, including a lack of labour and delays in the global supply chain.

None of these difficulties, both local and international, are likely to be resolved in the short-term, and with many of the industrial disputes becoming increasingly bitter, i analysis suggests getting on with life isn’t going to be any easier in 2023.

Experts say we can expect strikes to continue as increased energy costs hit household income throughout winter, as inflation continues to climb.

Alex Chapman, researcher at the left-leaning think-tank New Economics Forum, told i he believes the point where the economic damage being caused by strikes outweighs the cost to government of meeting inflationary pay demands is fast approaching. But he thinks the Conservative leadership is unlikely to admit defeat.

“I think we’re in for a rocky road in 2023,” he said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s even more in the way of strikes than we’ve already seen, I just don’t see where the resolution is coming from.”

And the Government seems resigned to the strikes going ahead. “We will do all we can to mitigate the impact of this action, but the only way to stop the disruption completely is for union bosses to get back round the table,” a spokesperson said.

Trains

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Railway cleaners stage a protest outside the Transport Department (DfT), London, calling on the Government to end the ‘scandal’ of poverty pay (Photo: Yui Mok/PA Wire)

Multiple public transport unions remain in conflict with their employers over pay and conditions and the government’s strategy in the long term.

Railway staff have made many of the headlines, with the RMT, the TSSA and Aslef staging strikes throughout the year.

Trouble had been brewing as the final Covid restrictions were lifted in February and passenger numbers were slow to recover.

Meanwhile, reports emerged that the Government had asked train operators to cut costs by up to 10 per cent – having bailed train operators out to the tune of £16bn in subsidies during the pandemic – at the same time as workers were looking for a pay rise to respond to spiralling inflation.

The row exploded in May when members of the RMT at Network Rail and 13 operators balloted for strike action, with general secretary Mick Lynch warning walkouts could last a “very, very long time.”

That prediction has proven to be accurate and although Transport Secretary Mark Harper has demonstrated more willingness to engage with the unions than his predecessors, rail disruption doesn’t look likely to end soon.

The RMT and Aslef have both obtained new mandates from members for a further six months of strike action, and TSSA could follow suit.

Mr Lynch has previously said the strikes could continue until spring 2023.

Aside from the pay rows, train operators are also grappling with a shortage of staff, a training backlog and high sickness levels, problems which are likely to continue well into the new year.

Buses

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Striking bus drivers attend their picket line at the Walworth Abellio garage in South London (Photo: Guy Smallman/Getty)

The picture is a little better on buses, where many drivers across the country won pay increases during 2022.

Unite the union, which represents many of them, says a wave of “new unionism”‘” since Sharon Graham became general secretary has seen an 827 per cent increase in passenger transport disputes.

Transport companies including Arriva, Stagecoach and Go Ahead Group have all agreed pay deals worth up to 20 per cent after driver walkouts in areas including Hull, Kent and Liverpool.

However, pay deals are generally agreed at the local level in the bus industry and there are parts of the country where disputes are yet to be resolved such as London and the North East.

Many bus companies are also cutting back on routes, arguing passenger numbers have not recovered from the pandemic and they are no longer financially viable.

Several Labour mayors in the north are hoping to follow the lead of Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester in capping fares and taking buses back into local control.

Airports

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Passengers have been hit by long queues at Manchester Airport for months (Photo: Peter Byrne/PA Wire)

Huge security queues, lost baggage and cancelled flights marred the return of air travel this year, as the aviation industry quickly became overwhelmed.

Bosses in the airline industry blamed difficulty recruiting and training staff, although unions argued they were paying the price for having made mass redundancies during the pandemic.

After a chaotic spring and summer season, the staffing crisis has lessened.

Manchester Airport Group, which also owns Stansted and East Midlands and was among the most criticised for its performance, says it has now recruited more than 2,000 new staff and that 97 per cent of passengers passed through security in fewer than 15 minutes in November.

Passenger numbers are now at 84 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.

The industry is not immune from the industrial unrest, however, and baggage handlers at Heathrow staged a strike on December 16 in a row over pay.

Pilots have also threatened to strike although the country’s flagship carrier British Airways headed off a walkout by agreeing a pay deal in October.

Passports and border checks

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A queue outside the passport office in Peterborough. The UK Passport Office was dealing with a backlog of more than 550,000 applications at the end of June (Photo: Joe Giddens/PA)

It wasn’t just finding a bus, train or plane available to get on that made travel tricky in 2022.

Obtaining a passport also proved to be a challenge, after the Passport Office failed to cope with a surge in demand for new issues and renewals following the pandemic.

Over the summer, Labour claimed there were at least half a million applications stuck in a backlog, with union officials blaming the government for an over-reliance on poorly-trained agency workers.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman told MPs the crisis was ‘fixed’ in November, however the government is still advising that applications could take up to 10 weeks, when previously the target was three.

The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) has also obtained a mandate for strike action from around 100,000 workers at 124 employers, including many departments of Government.

Staff at UK Border Force are among those who walked out over the Christmas period, and again from Wednesday 28 until today, threatening disruption to passport checks at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, Glasgow, Cardiff and Birmingham airports.

The Government drafted in military personnel and civil servants to cover for strikers by checking passports at Border Control instead.

The dispute is showing little signs of resolution – the PCS has described the current offer of a 3 per cent pay rise as “insulting” while the Government says demands for 11 per cent are unaffordable.

Driving tests

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The driving test backlog continues (Photo: PA)

Another of the PCS targets for the first wave of strike action is the Driving and Vehicles Standards Agency (DVSA), where driving instructors, examiners and call centre staff are due to continue December’s strikes and walk out in January.

It means learners will have difficulty taking or booking driving tests, in a system that had already been hit by a post-Covid backlog this year. Some have faced waits of up to six months for a driving test, depending where they live in the country.

The DVSA was aiming to have the wait time down to nine weeks by the end of the year, by recruiting more examiners and extending opening times.

The PCS says it will be announcing strike dates in other departments, including the Home Office and Department for Work and Pensions, over the course of the next few weeks which will affect services including passports, driving tests and licences, border checks and job centres.

NHS – doctors, nurses, ambulance staff

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Nurses are set to strike later this month (Photo: Getty)

Healthcare workers across the NHS are in dispute with the Government over pay, and some have already announced strike dates.

There was a nurses strike in Northern Ireland on 12 December and around 100,000 nurses at more than 50 health trusts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland walked out on December 15 and 20.

Unions were negotiating with hospitals over staffing levels during the strike and a number of units were exempt including chemotherapy, dialysis, critical care and neonatal services.

Pat Cullen, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), said nursing staff felt “a heavy weight of responsibility” to make the strikes “safe”.

The row is showing little sign of resolution, with the RCN asking for 5 per cent above the rate of inflation – the inflation rate for the retail prices index was 14 per cent in November – saying nurses had suffered a 20 per cent real-terms pay cut since 2010. The Government says the demands are “unaffordable”.

Meanwhile, ambulance crews across three unions – Unite, Unison and GMB – went on strike on 21 December.

Five services in England were affected – in the North West, North East, Yorkshire, London and the South West.

This is another dispute that looks set to continue, with Unison saying it will be re-balloting around 13,000 NHS staff for action in the new year after votes at 10 trusts and ambulance services fell just short of threshold required for a mandate.

Junior doctors are also set to ballot for strike action in January, after describing the 2 per cent pay rise they were given by the Government this year as “derisory”.

Mail

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Royal Mail workers hold placards and banners as they gather in Parliament Square, to hold a protest over pay and jobs (Photo: Alberto Pezzali/AP)

Yet another bitter pay dispute involves postal workers and Royal Mail.

More than 115,000 staff were balloted in the summer for strike action after the company failed to offer a “no strings” pay increase.

Leaders at the Communication Workers Union (CWU) were incensed when managers warned they would impose a 2 per cent pay rise by execution action and the result was a massive mandate for a walkout – 97 per cent of staff voted “yes” on a 77 per cent turnout in July.

The strikes began in August and have continued ever since, causing a massive pile-up of undelivered letters.

Postal workers have warned that people could be missing important mail, such as women being told about breast cancer screening letters.

The row escalated in October when Royal Mail said it would have to cut up to 10,000 jobs by next August, including 6,000 redundancies.

Striking staff have called for the removal of the chief executive, Simon Thompson, from his post and said the jobs threat is an attempt to hold the union “to ransom”.

Neither side is backing down and one Royal Mail employee of 38 years told the BBC the distance between management and striking workers was wider than during any previous dispute.

“It seems to me there’s not really a negotiation,” the worker said.

Education

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Teachers’ union leaders are set to announce further details on when the walkouts will take place (Photo: PA)

Like many other public sector employees, teachers also remain on tense terms with the Government over pay and conditions.

Strikes have already gone ahead in Scotland this month, and unions in the rest of the UK are considering industrial action in 2023.

They are rejecting an offer of a 5 per cent pay rise and are asking for 10 per cent.

Most state school teachers in England and Wales received a 5 per cent pay rise this year. But with inflation running at 11 per cent, unions are not happy.

The NEU and NASUWT unions are both balloting members to see if they want to strike, with voting due to close in the first few weeks of January.

If there is a mandate for action, parents could expect schools to start closing within the next few months.

College teaching staff and university lecturers have also been striking over pay, pensions and working conditions.

‘Whether this continues depends on how the Government responds’

Experts fear the disruption experienced in 2022 is likely to continue next year, and could even worsen given the Government’s increasingly hard-line stance on public sector pay, and a number of unions gearing up for fresh ballots on strike action.

Researcher Mr Chapman said Britain was vulnerable to these disputes because real-terms wages were only just recovering to levels seen before the financial crash in 2008 before the cost of living crisis started.

“Coming out of the pandemic most people were feeling they’re not much better off,” he said. “And within that there are winners and losers – particularly public sector workers and workers of outsourced services such as rail and mail – wages were lower.

“We’ve seen some strikes over the past decade, but not on a large scale. It feels like this time the fuse was a lot shorter with these workers.

“Their tolerance for more of the austerity narrative, the Government saying it can’t afford pay rises in line with inflation, has diminished, and that’s come to a head with the strikes.

“Whether this continues and becomes something that lasts for multiple years depends on how the government responds.”

Mr Chapman believes the government has underestimated union power, with memberships ticking up recently after decades of decline. He also suggested the Conservatives might believe a fight with unions will work for them politically.

“I think potentially some in Government have been a little slow to appreciate that they’re facing quite an empowered workforce,” he argued. “There’s been a little bit of an awakening.

“There have been some effective communicators such as Mick Lynch who has done a pretty good job of making people realise the power they have.

“The Government might not just be motivated by financial constraints but also the political dimension – they wouldn’t be the first Conservative Government in history. The strikes could be a useful stick with which to beat the Labour Party with.”

Professor Jim Phillips, an expert in economic and social history at the University of Glasgow, said the number of “days lost” to strikes was likely to remain low in historic terms.

“If you look back at the so-called Winter of Discontent in 1979 it was 30 million days lost, I doubt this winter will be anywhere close to that figure,” he told i.

“But there are some similarities, the types of people involved, for example, the foundational economic workers.

“In the 70s they were coal miners, power station workers, firefighters, nurses. That’s pretty much the type of workers involved now, it’s a broad base of the workforce, and representative of society.”

Prof Phillips also suggested that the industrial disputes have been symptomatic of wider problems in the effectiveness of the British state.

“This year there has been a narrative of incompetence in public life,” he added. “The strikes are suggestive of long-term disfunction arising from poor practices that are being badly executed.

“This intersects with a need for a more realistic conversation about the consequences of Brexit and the way that’s contributed to the difficulty providing services.

“I also think what we’re seeing is a much stronger understanding that the relationship between having a job and economic security has broken down.”

A Government spokesperson said: “We regret the decision taken by unions to strike and we greatly value the work of all their members across the country. We will do all we can to mitigate the impact of this action, but the only way to stop the disruption completely is for union bosses to get back round the table and call off these damaging strikes.

“We want to ensure people are paid fairly, and we have been reasonable in our approach to agreeing to the independent pay review bodies’ recommendations for public sector pay rises.

“An inflation-matching pay increase of 11 per cent for all public sector workers would cost £28 billion, worsening debt and embedding inflation, which makes everyone poorer. That would be a cost to each household of just under £1,000.”