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Ministers are planning a major “recruitment campaign” to attract younger people to operate trains in order to avert a demographic time bomb that would cripple Britain’s rail service, the head of the drivers’ union said.
A fifth of Aslef members are due to retire in the next five years, and not enough of a new generation were joining the profession, general secretary Mick Whelan told the Financial Times.
“You need to recruit the number of people you need to run the service,” Whelan said, adding that the new government had indicated to him “they want to go on a massive recruitment campaign”.
The average age of a train driver is 48, according to UK government data released earlier this year that found the workforce would shrink “without opening up opportunities for new recruits”.
Separate data from the National Skills Academy for Rail found that the sector had a significant diversity problem; 90 per cent of drivers were men, and 90 per cent white.
In May the previous Conservative government launched a consultation into lowering the minimum age for train drivers from 20 to 18.
It said this was needed to improve the future reliability of the network, given the number of drivers close to retirement age. It takes around a year and a half to train a driver.
A report for the Labour government over the summer suggested a significant number of new people were needed across the rail network. The Department for Transport said it planned to hire more staff on the railways.
Whelan’s comments came after Aslef members this week voted to accept a 15 per cent three-year pay rise, ending more than two years of regular strikes which have caused major disruption to passengers.
But a shortage of train drivers is still causing disruption to many around the country.
Thameslink, one of the UK’s busiest operators that serves routes in London and the Home Counties, on Thursday was forced to put on rail replacement buses because of “a shortage of available train crew” on some of its routes.
The company said it was hiring new drivers, but suffered disruption when annual leave, sickness and training combined to leave it short-staffed.
Large parts of the rail industry have for years based their timetables on the assumption that drivers will choose to work voluntary overtime, particularly at weekends.
While this system worked fairly well before the pandemic, many rail companies have reported that this system has broken down, and it is now harder to find enough drivers willing to work extra hours.
Some executives have also privately warned that the recent pay settlement with the government could exacerbate the problems in the coming months, if drivers were handed backdated lump sums of thousands of pounds and so felt less inclined to volunteer for overtime shifts.
But Whelan said: “You can’t rely on overtime forever . . . it is our job to get the number of drivers up.”