July 5th - From road to rail: A brief briefing for the next Transport Secretary
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 5 July 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are you in line to be the next transport secretary? You're in luck. In just 10 minutes, I’ll give you free advice on everything you need to tackle, from road, to rail, to air.
Tune into today's podcast for a concise guide to transforming our transport system.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Friday the 5th of July, |
| 0:08.5 | which means that we've got a different government than we had yesterday. I hope that you were |
| 0:15.0 | happy with the result, or at least you are prepared to accept it, and I am sorry for the many good people in politics who lost their seats. |
| 0:25.6 | I don't think I've ever seen a situation where all three transport secretaries in a government, |
| 0:33.5 | that's Grant Shaps, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, and then Mark Harper, have lost their seats to labour at the same time. |
| 0:43.7 | But that's what's happened. |
| 0:45.0 | And here we have Kirstama going to the palace, kissing hands with the king and setting up his government. |
| 0:51.7 | And that's why I'm here to help, because we don't know who the |
| 0:56.7 | new Transport Secretary is going to be, but there's a pretty good chance it's going to be |
| 1:01.6 | Louis Haig, who for a couple of years has been the Shadow Transport Secretary. So to help make |
| 1:09.7 | life easier for her, I've got a shopping list of everything she needs |
| 1:14.7 | to do in order to sort out Britain. Let's start on the railways because that is the complete |
| 1:23.1 | basket case. There are still a very live dispute going on between the train drivers union |
| 1:30.1 | and the rail delivery group representing the train operators, which the Department for Transport |
| 1:38.2 | tells how to run their trains. And effectively, the train drivers would like to have a no strings pay increase. |
| 1:48.3 | Probably, I don't know, it's such a long time since we started negotiating. You're going to have |
| 1:53.2 | to give them something like 15%, no strings attached, and then start talking about reforms, |
| 2:00.3 | something which Mick Whelan, who I've talked to a lot, |
| 2:03.2 | he's the General Secretary of the Train Drivers Union, is keen to discuss, but only in the sense of |
| 2:10.1 | selling such reforms. Also, don't forget that actually the main rail union, the RMT, is also kind of in dispute. |
| 2:22.0 | They're at the moment having a fairly passive time, but it may be that the discussions with the train operators haven't been going well and we could be back to industrial action there. I very much hope that is not the case. |
| 2:37.1 | But the railways and I use them the whole time are in a right old mess. They are frankly rotting and it is |
... |
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