Above-Inflation Avanti Pay Deal Averts West Coast Strike
Train drivers on Avanti West Coast accepted a 3.6 per cent pay rise — 0.7 points above inflation — with time-and-a-half Sunday pay and up to £720 for a fifth working day, averting a threatened strike on the London–Manchester line the prime minister himself uses to reach his Manchester base. It is the first rail settlement approved under Mr Burnham; the union said the deal “enhances our members’ terms” and the Department for Transport called it “fair and affordable”.
Every government pays a price for industrial peace; the question is always whether it is a good price, and this deal will be read two ways. Passengers spared an autumn of West Coast strikes will call it governing; critics framing it as a “lucrative” settlement on the PM’s own commuter line will call it buying quiet with public money — and the above-inflation figure sets a benchmark every other rail union has now noted, on a railway being folded into public ownership where the state is increasingly the direct employer. That is the structural tension nationalisation was always going to surface: the government cannot blame private operators for settlements it now signs itself. Watch the next operators’ negotiations — benchmarks travel fast on the railway.