Campaigners to protest at transport authority meeting on Thursday morning

Unions and campaigners have protested that an edict from Nexus that employees should not talk to ‘third parties’ about the Metro re-invigoration programme is an attack on democratic rights that bans staff even talking to their MPs or councillors about the issues involved.

The ban comes on the heels of an opinion poll which indicates that 60 per cent of people in the northeast want the Metro to be run by a public-sector organisation, and that only one in five supported plans to privatise Metro services and infrastructure maintenance.

Campaign supporters will lobby tomorrow (Thursday) morning’s meeting of the Tyne and Wear Passenger Transport Authority wearing gags in protest at the ban – and after being told that Keep Metro Public will not be allowed to speak or ask a question at the meeting, which starts at 10:00 at the Newcastle Civic Centre.

“This is a shocking ban which deprives Metro workers of their basic democratic rights,” RMT regional organiser Stan Herschel said today.

“It effectively bans staff from exercising their right to campaign against the threat to their jobs and conditions posed by privatisation of Metro services, and it would even ban them from talking to an MP or councillor about it.

“Is Nexus seriously suggesting that a Metro worker cannot go home and talk over worries about privatisation with a partner?

“It is bad enough when transport workers are barred from talking to the media, but banning Metro workers from talking to anyone outside the organisation is a step into Big Brother territory and it has to be reversed,” Stan Herschel said.

ends

Notes to editors: The government has agreed to provide £300 million for the ‘re-invigoration’ of the Tyne and Wear Metro, all of which will come from the public purse. However, Nexus, which itself had put the case to keep Metro as an integrated railway, now intends to invite private-sector bids to operate passenger services and maintain infrastructure.

An opinion poll conducted by ICM Omnibus for Keep Metro Public asked a representative sample of 549 people in Tyne and Wear, Cleveland County Durham and Northumberland between September 1 and September 11 the question:

“You may have seen that the Government is proposing to provide extra funds to improve the Tyne and Wear Metro service. Do you think the Tyne & Wear Metro should be run by a publicly owned organisation or should it be run by a private company?

The responses were:

Publicly owned organisation: 60 per cent
Private company: 22 per cent
Doesn’t matter: 10 per cent
Don’t know 7 per cent

The full details of the survey are available by email from the RMT office.

Tyne and Wear Metro was the best performing rail operator in the UK last year, according to Office of Rail Regulation figures, running 95.57 per cent of trains on time in 2007/08, ahead of all privately operated franchises

Nexus says that its figures so far this year are even better, with 96.72 per cent of trains run on time. The network also carried more than 40 million passengers for the first time in 16 years.