UK
Junior doctors set to meet minister to discuss pay row

Ella Pickover and Jane Kirby, PA
Mon, 29 January 2024 



Junior doctors in England are to meet with the Government to “discuss next steps” in the bitter row over pay, the Health Secretary has announced.

The British Medical Association (BMA) and health minister Andrew Stephenson are meeting this week, Victoria Atkins said.

Meanwhile Ms Atkins said that she “genuinely” thinks that a deal can be reached with consultants in England.


It comes after senior hospital doctors narrowly rejected a deal that would have seen medics receive a pay rise of between 6% and 19.6%.

Ms Atkins told BBC Breakfast she had already spoken to the BMA adding: “Minister Stephenson is meeting the junior doctors committee this week to discuss next steps.”

Dr Robert Laurenson and Dr Vivek Trivedi, co-chairs of the BMA’s Junior Doctors Committee, said: “After almost three weeks of silence from the Government we could have been using to find an end to this dispute, we can confirm that following our letter requesting talks we will be meeting with health minister Andrew Stephenson later this week.

“We hope he will come with a constructive attitude toward getting a credible offer we can put to our members, as a matter of urgency, that can end this dispute once and for all.”

Ms Atkins added: “And with the consultants you’ll know that next that last week sadly, the consultants voted by a very narrow margin against the fair and reasonable settlement that we put forward that we negotiated with the BMA itself.

“We think there are around 600 votes across both unions that stopped that from getting over the line, so we are within touching distance.”


“And I very much look forward to the BMA explaining to us how they can manage this big divide in opinion amongst their own membership and how we can deal with some of the technical aspects that were raised during the ballot period.

“I obviously want to get a deal done, I genuinely think we can, but we’ve all just got to have some reasonable expectations as we get around the table.”

Last week the consultant members of the BMA rejected the Government’s revised pay offer by 51.1%.

Consultants from the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association (HCSA) rejected the offer earlier this month.

Meanwhile, junior doctors in England are currently being balloted to see whether they want to continue strike action.

Talks between the Government and junior doctors broke down last year.

Medics on the BMA’s Junior Doctors Committee said that ministers had failed to put forward a credible offer before a pre-set deadline.

As a result, junior doctors staged two strikes, one before Christmas and another, the longest strike in NHS history, at the start of the year.

The NHS in England has been beset by strike action for more than a year.

Walkouts by various staff groups including doctors, nurses, paramedics and physiotherapists have led to more than 1.3 million appointments, procedures and operations being rescheduled.

BP under pressure from hedge fund to ditch clean energy strategy

Jasper Jolly

THE GUARDIAN
Mon, 29 January 2024 

Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters

BP is under pressure from a hedge fund to ditch a strategy that will see it cut its oil and gas output in favour of investing in clean energy.

London-based Bluebell Capital Partners has written to BP arguing that the FTSE 100 energy company’s strategy has depressed its share price and presumed a “drastic decline in oil and gas demand, which we consider to be utterly unrealistic”.

BP was already undergoing significant changes under former chief executive Bernard Looney, who had set a course to cut oil output by a quarter compared with 2019 levels by the end of the decade – making it the only oil major to pledge to cut output, albeit having reduced its ambitions.


The company has also invested in green energy such as solar, wind and biofuels, and it is looking at green hydrogen production as it considers ways to make money once oil demand falls.

Looney was ousted as chief executive in September after admitting he failed to fully inform the BP board about relationships with colleagues. He was later formally dismissed and denied more than £32m in pay and share awards over “serious misconduct”.

However, BP is still run by supporters of Looney’s strategy. Chairman Helge Lund appointed Looney’s former finance boss, Murray Auchincloss, as chief executive.

Bluebell co-founders Giuseppe Bivona and Marco Taricco wrote in their letter that they would have called for Looney’s resignation had he not left. The letter was sent in October, shortly after it acquired a small stake in BP.

Bluebell is a relatively small but influential fund which has previously mounted campaigns against French food company Danone, where it played a part in the departure of its chief executive, as well as in Glencore, where it failed in its efforts to have the UK-listed commodities company sell its thermal coal operations. However, it only manages about $150m across a dozen or so companies, meaning it does not have the financial might to force BP into a shareholder vote.

Bivona told the Guardian that the company was made up of “passionate environmentalists”, and that the fund manager was “not telling BP to stay away from clean energy”.

However, he said he wanted BP to “stay away from businesses in which they have no right to win” and where investment returns are low, such as solar and offshore wind.

In the 30-page letter, which was first reported by the Financial Times, Bluebell argued that BP was worth 50% more than its share price implied, and called for it to increase production in the next few years and pledge only to cut emissions “in line with society”. BP’s shares traded at 466p on Monday, valuing the company at £79bn.

Bluebell’s calls for a change in strategy will face opposition from BP’s leadership and also from environmentalists, many of whom argue that the company is still not doing enough to cut emissions. The International Energy Agency in 2021 said that no new oil and gas fields should be drilled if the world is to limit temperature increases.

Mark van Baal, head of Dutch activist group Follow This, has in recent years forced shareholder votes at BP, Shell, Chevron and ExxonMobil calling for stronger emissions reduction targets.

ExxonMobil is taking legal action to try to dismiss a resolution for its next annual meeting.

Van Baal questioned whether Bluebell would gain much shareholder support, and argued that BP’s share price under performance versus peers was related to its decision to cut its dividend in 2020.

“We don’t think responsible shareholders will allow a conservative investor to slow down a transition that is already moving far too slowly,” he said.

“Letters don’t change companies; shareholders’ votes do. Let them file a shareholder resolution and see how many shareholders support going back in time. We don’t think they will get much votes.”

A BP spokesperson said the company “welcomes constructive engagement with our shareholders” and that it has received support for its strategy after recent meetings with most major shareholders.

The spokesperson said: “We continue to make significant progress, remain focused on delivery, and are confident the strategy will grow the value of BP and deliver sustainable long-term value for shareholders.”

UK

John Lewis considering cutting 11,000 jobs after slashing redundancy terms


Sarah Butler

THE GUARDIAN
Sat, 27 January 2024 

Photograph: John Walton/PA

The owner of John Lewis and Waitrose is considering cutting up to 11,000 staff jobs in the next five years, after the retail group slashed redundancy terms this week.

Sources said at least 10% of the staff-owned business’s 76,000-strong workforce could go across the group’s head office, supermarkets and department stores.

Department heads are working on plans and the number of roles in the business is expected to be gradually reduced over several years via redundancies and not replacing staff who leave, sources said.


John Lewis warned about potential job cuts in March last year as part of a plan to reduce costs and use technology to improve efficiency. The group has already cut thousands of jobs partly through store closures, including 16 department stores and several supermarkets, over the past few years.

One well-placed source said John Lewis executives had discussed cutting as many as 11,000 roles as part of its latest turnaround plan – amid rising pay and other costs and poor sales. Another said this figure had been briefed to select staff by some managers as the company battles to bounce back from a £230m full-year loss.

The scale of potential job cuts emerged after the John Lewis Partnership (JLP), which is owned by its staff via a trust, wrote to workers this week telling them it was cutting the terms of its redundancy package in half – offering one week of pay a year of service instead of two for anyone being made redundant from 1 February.

One member of staff, known as partners because of they co-own the business, said the announcement of a cut was particularly galling as it came shortly after a number of senior executives had left on the more generous deal.

JLP told staff it was making the change as the current package was “higher than typical market practice and comes at a very high cost”. It said it needed to “free up cash” with a “more affordable” policy.

The company offers the “partnership redundancy pay” package on top of statutory redundancy pay which is set by the government at one week a year of service for over 22s and 1.5 weeks for those over 41, capped at a maximum of just over £19,000.

In an internal memo issued on Thursday, first reported by the Telegraph, the John Lewis Partnership said: “Against all of our competing priorities for investment, it’s fair to say that the high cost of redundancy pay has been one of the things that’s prevented us from moving as quickly as we’ve wanted to transform ourselves for the future, and has restricted our ability to invest more in pay.”

It added that it was raising the minimum redundancy payment for those who did not qualify for the full partnership package from one week’s pay to four weeks to “better support those with shorter service who are affected by redundancy”.

The announcement prompted a flurry of furious posts on the group’s internal messaging board with one worker saying: “Another example of major changes being made which will affect partners without a dialogue with partners.”

Some called for an emergency meeting of the group’s partnership council, which gives the owner-workers a democratic voice via elected representatives from across the business.

One member of staff told the Guardian: “We are held up as a better way of doing business and this just sits uncomfortably particularly when you take into account the recent wave of leadership level [redundancies].”

A spokesperson for JLP said: “What we are doing is cost-neutral and it is a rebalancing because any saving on redundancy pay will be directly reinvested into partner pay.”

The news on cutting redundancy terms was sent out via an email and then posted on the company intranet with staff not informed of any discussion at the partnership council.

JLP said the issue had been put to the council and the group’s democratic processes had been followed but the meeting had not been livestreamed to staff.

UK
Union to use Human Rights Act to challenge minimum service strike law


Alan Jones, PA Industrial Correspondent
Sat, 27 January 2024 

A union is to launch a judicial review against the government’s new law to stop strike action in the Border Force.

The Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) said it will use the Human Rights Act to challenge the new law aimed at ensuring minimum levels of service during strikes.

The announcement was made by PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka at a huge rally marking the 40th anniversary of the ban on trade unions at the GCHQ communications headquarters.

The new law allows employers to order staff to come into work during strike action to ensure minimum service levels are met.

The PCS said it will argue this contravenes the right to strike enshrined in Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Mark Serwotka said: “Forty years on from Margaret Thatcher banning unions at GCHQ, a Conservative government is once again attacking trade unions.

“So it’s fitting today, as we mark the courage and determination of those workers who refused to hand in their trade union membership, that I can tell you we will be fighting this new injustice in the courts.

“It is a fundamental human right of any worker to withdraw their labour to protect their terms and one we shall defend on behalf of our members in the Border Force.”

The union is being represented by Thompsons Solicitors, for whom partner Neil Todd said: “Minimum service levels are very difficult to justify in a legal regime which is already so restrictive when it comes to trade union rights.

“The Border Security Minimum Service Regulations provide an unlimited freedom to undermine the right to strike, which we contend is unlawful as it exceeds powers under the Strikes Act. The government have been given 14 days to respond to our letter”.

TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said: “The TUC and the whole union movement will stand with PCS every step of the way with this legal challenge.

“These new minimum service level regulations represent an unprecedented attack on our fundamental right to strike.

“This case is just the beginning. We will use every lever at our disposal to fight these cynical laws.

“These past few weeks have shown that these laws are unworkable. Any half-decent employer will steer well clear of minimum service levels.

“Ministers have designed these laws to escalate disputes – not resolve them. They’re undemocratic and likely illegal – and they’ve dragged us further away from European democratic norms.”

Members of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) (Andrew Milligan/PA)

Thousands of trade unionists joined the rally in Cheltenham.

Mr Nowak added: “If any employer dares to use minimum service levels, they will face the full force of the union movement.

“Unions won’t stop until these spiteful laws are off the statute book for good.”

Unite general secretary Sharon Graham, speaking about the minimum service levels law, told the rally: “This legalisation puts this Government at war with workers. We will use every tactic in our armoury to push back any employer who uses this anti-union legalisation.

“And make no mistake, any employer who chooses to serve the first work notice – this will be seen as a hostile act; a stake in the ground – and we will escalate and we will win.”

Matt Wrack, Fire Brigades Union general secretary, said: “In its final months in office, this dying Tory Government is seeking to prevent workers from striking even when they have a democratic mandate to so.

“In the fire and rescue service, as in other sectors, this could amount to a de-facto strike ban.

“The trade union movement cannot and will not accept this attack on basic democratic rights.

“The Tories’ agenda is about driving down wages and conditions while the rich get richer.

“The TUC is committed to a campaign of mass resistance to the Minimum Service Levels Act, up to and including non-compliance, and we look forward to a Labour government repealing both it and the 2016 Trade Union Act within its first 100 days.”

UK

Post Office chair dismissed as business reels from Horizon IT scandal

Hayden Vernon and Jon Ungoed-Thomas
Sat, 27 January 2024 

Photograph: Sky News video grab

The chair of the Post Office has been dismissed by the government as the state-owned company reels from the Horizon IT scandal.

Henry Staunton was this weekend told by the business secretary, Kemi Badenoch, that he will be replaced.

Badenoch said in a statement: “The Post Office is rightfully under a heightened level of scrutiny at this time. With that in mind, I felt there was a need for new leadership, and we have parted ways with mutual consent.”

Related: No 10 ‘taking seriously’ reports that Horizon files show Post Office cover-up

Staunton, 75, only became chair in December 2022, after a long career in FTSE boardrooms.

The decision to replace him comes as Rishi Sunak tries to push through new laws to “swiftly exonerate and compensate” those affected by the Horizon scandal.

“This is one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history,” Sunak told MPs earlier this month. “People who worked hard to serve their communities had their lives and their reputations destroyed through absolutely no fault of their own. The victims must get justice and compensation.”

More than 700 post office operators were prosecuted by the Post Office after its faulty accounting software, Horizon, made it look as though money had gone missing from their shops. The saga prompted an outcry across the country and was dramatised in the ITV series Mr Bates vs The Post Office earlier this month.

There had been several sources of tension between the Post Office chair and the government in recent months, according to a source who spoke to Sky News, which first reported the departure, including a row over the appointment of a new independent director.

In a hearing before the Commons’ business and trade committee last June, Staunton was repeatedly questioned by the chair, Darren Jones, about £1.6m in bonus payments that had been made to executives in 2021-22. One of the ways bonuses were awarded depended on the Horizon inquiry; the Post Office admitted it had made mistakes and 33 employees handed back bonuses.

The government’s shareholding in Post Office Limited is managed by UK Government Investments (UKGI), which is also responsible for the public’s stakes in Channel 4 and the Met Office.

The Post Office relies on government funding to operate and has struggled with tough competition in recent years.

Staunton previously chaired Phoenix Group, the insurance company, and WH Smith, the high street retailer.

His executive career included a stint at ITV, while he held other boardroom seats at companies such as BSkyB and Ladbrokes.

A government spokesperson said: “In a phone call earlier today, the secretary of state for business and trade and Henry Staunton, chair of Post Office Limited (POL), agreed to part ways with mutual consent.

“An interim will be appointed shortly and a recruitment process for a new chair will be launched in due course, in accordance with the governance code for public appointments.”

A Post Office spokesperson said: “On Saturday afternoon the Post Office was informed that the business and trade secretary had asked Henry Staunton to stand down as chair of the Post Office. We have been advised by the government that they will appoint an interim chair shortly.”

After the latest Max crisis, Boeing must focus on flight, not finance


Jasper Jolly
Sun, 28 January 2024

Photograph: Jason Redmond/Reuters

Aviation jargon can hide all kinds of horrors. This month Boeing introduced a new phrase to a wider audience – Quality escape (n.): part of a 737 Max plane falling off at 14,000ft, producing a deafening roar as the air rushes past passengers fast enough to rip phones from hands and clothing from bodies.

It appears that someone in the factory failed to properly fit bolts securing the plug panel for an unused door. For followers of Boeing’s travails over recent years, the apparent failures in quality control that led to the incident were scarcely believable, less than five years after regulators grounded the 737 Max following two deadly crashes caused by flawed design.

Remarkably, no one was seriously injured or killed in the latest incident, which took place on an Alaska Airlines flight on 5 January from Portland, Oregon. But Dave Calhoun, Boeing’s chief executive, will face intense scrutiny from investors on Wednesday as the company publishes its results for the past year. Once again, the US’s plane-making champion is facing deep questions about its future.


Calhoun quickly accepted the manufacturer had at least partial responsibility for the latest incident – in marked contrast to the heavily criticised dithering and diversion by his predecessor, Dennis Muilenburg, during the previous 737 Max crisis. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the US regulator, last week said that it would allow the variant of the 737 Max 9 with the door plug to fly again – after demanding checks to the bolts on every plane.

Yet the FAA’s green light came with a major caveat: Boeing would not be allowed to expand production of the 737 Max, its bestselling plane, until the regulator was “satisfied that the quality control issues uncovered during this process are resolved”. Calhoun will be pushed for guidance on the cost of the resulting delays to deliveries, although he may struggle to give precise numbers.

Richard Aboulafia, managing director at AeroDynamic Advisory, a consultancy, said he believed Boeing had “under-resourced production ramp-up”, leaving too few workers trying to make too many planes. He said that was a symptom of Boeing’s focus in recent decades on financial performance at the expense of its historical design prowess.

The financial focus was most closely associated with Jim McNerney, chief executive for the decade up to 2015. McNerney had learned his trade from Jack Welch, the boss of General Electric (GE). Welch became a household name by pumping up financial performance, only for his legacy to be questioned when GE nearly collapsed during the financial crisis.

Calhoun is himself a 26-year GE veteran. Boeing appears to be lining up Stephanie Pope as a potential next leader. But Pope, who was promoted on 1 January to chief operating officer, also comes from a financial rather than engineering background.

Nick Cunningham, an aerospace analyst at Agency Partners, said Boeing needed new leaders to return its focus to being “one of the greatest engineering companies the world has ever seen” rather than an also-ran that was steadily losing market share to its European rival Airbus.

The earlier Max crisis and the pandemic took a heavy financial toll on Boeing, and analysts expect a further $2.1bn (£1.6bn) loss before tax for 2023 – its fifth year in a row in the red – according to forecasts collated by S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Boeing is not in danger of going out of business. The company is too big to fail, a behemoth whose travails are large enough to show up in US GDP figures. It could go to investors to ask for more cash. Some analysts say it could even look to sell its defence arm if the needs of the civil aviation business become acute. And the US government would almost certainly act as a backstop if its crises somehow worsened. But failure is not merely a financial measure, as passengers on the Alaska Airlines flight can attest.

Cunningham said Boeing needed to generate cash to pay for the eventual development of a new plane to replace the ageing 737 – even if Calhoun has said the company will not do so for about a decade. That could be its opportunity to get out of a hole and help it catch up with Airbus, but the latest incident will probably delay that again.

“The issue is the business cycle doesn’t go on for ever,” said Cunningham, meaning the industry could go through a fallow period during which orders and cashflow dry up. “Boeing is running out of time.”

Thames Water faces sink or swim moment as debt crisis deepens

ONTARIO PENSION FUND OMERS IS INVESTOR

Michael Bow
Sun, 28 January 2024 

Thames Water serves 15 million households - Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg

A key portion of Thames Water’s £14bn debt pile has crashed to a record new low in the clearest sign yet that investors are abandoning the embattled group.

Fund managers who own Thames debt have been dumping some of its riskiest IOUs in recent days over fears the company could fail to repay the debts.

A bond linked to an entity in Thames’ byzantine debt structure has crashed by 20pc in value over the last fortnight. The bond, which is linked to a company called Thames Water (Kemble) Finance, is now worth 40p in the pound, down from a price of 50p. They were worth as much as 87p six months ago.
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While having no immediate impact on the group, or consumers, the bond market tremors are a sign investors believe that Thames Water could be heading for a further financial squeeze.

“The market is telling you that there is a high probability that these bonds don’t get repaid,” says one investor.

Thames is Britain’s largest water company with 15m customers. But the utility giant has been hamstrung in recent years by its complex debt structure.

It has £14bn of debts against £19bn of equity, according to most recent figures, meaning it has borrowed almost as much as investors have put in. This high leverage makes the company vulnerable to the whims of investors and banks.

Rising interest rates have put intense pressure on Thames as its debt repayment costs have increased rapidly.

Thames Water was handed a £750m lifeline from shareholders in July to stave off nationalisation, but bosses have admitted the company may need £2.5bn between now and 2030 to remain viable. Will it be able to raise the money?

As well as financial concerns, campaigners such as former Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey have also taken aim at the company over its environmental record.

Figures released last week showed the amount of sewage Thames dumped in London’s rivers rose by nearly five times last year versus 2022.

The gloomy backdrop underscores the challenges facing chairman Sir Adrian Montague and new Thames chief executive Chris Weston.

As the architect of New Labour’s Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) projects in the late 1990s, Sir Adrian helped usher in an era when deep-pocketed private investors ploughed money into public services.

Known as a fixer in Whitehall, Sir Adrian was parachuted into Thames in June to draw on his deep experience balancing the twin demands of the City and Westminster.

His experience will be valuable as Thames faces pressure from regulators, politicians, debtors, shareholders and campaigners alike.

Weston was the former chief executive of Aggreko and is well regarded in City circles for leading the power group successfully for seven years.

In a sign of intent last week, the duo moved to reshuffle a small portion of Thames’ debt mountain.

Chris Weston is charged with clearing some of Thames Water's debt pile - Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg

The company raised £850m of debt from investors at the same time as buying back £500m of existing debt. Orders for the bond were oversubscribed.

A bond investor said the sudden refinancing showed Thames was trying to get on the “front foot” to build momentum in the market ahead of a difficult year.

“It does show a degree of confidence at the regulated level. If it had not been subscribed to, it would have been a real kick in the teeth,” they said.

Tellingly, the bonds were priced at a more attractive price than they could have been, offering a small discount to the value of other Thames bonds.

TwentyFour Asset Management partner Gordon Shannon said the discount was an attempt to lift some of the gloom over the Thames name.

“Clearly Thames are giving a level of concession because there’s more than a little bit of a stink around the name,” he says.
However, the debt reshuffle is relatively small beer.

Shannon says: “While issuing longer dated debt is helpful at the margin in pushing some of their issues down the road, what Thames really needs is a fresh equity injection.”

Thames has a complex structure, with a regulated operating company called Thames Water Utilities running the network and several companies dubbed Kemble – named after the source of the River Thames – raising money to invest in the network by borrowing from bond markets.

Money flows back from Thames to Kemble but there are concerns about how much will trickle up in future. Ofwat launched a recent investigation into a £37.5m dividend payment that may have flouted regulations.

The bond slide last week signals that markets fear payments to bondholders could be choked off.

With shareholders like USS and OMERS having already ploughed £750m into the group over the summer, the question remains whether they will ride to the rescue once again or throw in the towel. Both groups have written down the value of their stakes in the utility recently. This week’s bond slide may prompt a further reassessment of Thames’ value.

One solution to the crunch may be to sell off some assets, such as the naming and branding rights for “Thames Water”, or to sell off swathes of UK land owned.

Thames licences its logo to companies such as HomeServe, so there also could be scope to make money from a sale. Sir Adrian and Weston will be weighing up how to fix the stink around Thames.

“It’s basically a game of chicken between the Government and the shareholders now on allowed returns versus the need for investment,” says the bondholder.

Thames needs to fix its leaks quickly.

UK

Tata Steel ‘open to more UK investment’ despite Port Talbot job cuts

Jasper Jolly and Alex Lawson

The Guardian
Sun, 28 January 2024 

Photograph: Dimitris Legakis/The Guardian

The owner of the Port Talbot steelworks is preparing to mount a defence of its decision to cut thousands of jobs at the south Wales plant, and float the possibility of creating more UK jobs in future, during testimony to MPs this week.

The Indian conglomerate Tata confirmed this month that it planned to close two blast furnaces at Port Talbot – shedding up to 2,800 jobs, with a further 300 potential redundancies at another site, in Llanwern.

The company and the government have faced criticism from MPs and unions, who argued that jobs could have been saved with greater investment and state support.


Related: ‘It’s a betrayal’: Port Talbot anger over Tata Steel’s decision to close furnaces

Tata Steel’s global chief executive, TV Narendran, and its UK chief executive, Rajesh Nair, will appear before MPs on the Welsh affairs committee on Tuesday as the impact of the company’s decision on the local community, Wale’s economy and the future of the UK steel sector is examined.

Tata’s decision to close the blast furnaces – along with a parallel decision by Chinese-owned British Steel in Scunthorpe – has caused consternation among MPs because it would leave the UK unable to make primary steel directly from iron ore.

In a document sent this weekend to employees and the government, and seen by the Guardian, Tata Steel attempted to “factcheck” claims made in coverage of its decision, which it said had presented a “misleading picture”.

Tata is expected to argue that it is open to investment in a new plant to make direct reduced iron (DRI), a technology that can produce iron using methane or hydrogen that would then go into the new electric arc furnaces.

The big advantage of the DRI process is that it is possible to produce steel with zero carbon emissions, meaning it is likely to play a key role in decarbonisation. It would also replace about 200 of the jobs under threat at Port Talbot, Tata said – although that would still leave thousands out of work.

The document said: “Tata Steel has also made clear that, with the right investment and policy environment, it is open to further investment, such as in a direct reduced iron (DRI) plant. We would look at the case for a potential DRI plant in the UK if the business conditions are right and, if in future, the government supported further investment.”

The document also directly addresses the prospect of a Labour government, adding that the company “is open to further investment in the future” but that it wants to turn the Port Talbot plant to profit first. Labour has said it will invest £3bn in the steel industry, and it is seriously considering backing hydrogen steelmaking as an option.

However, some politicians, including local MPs, may look sceptically at any suggestion that Tata should be given hundreds of millions of pounds more in subsidies shortly after it has received about £1bn in pledged support. Half of that will support Port Talbot’s switch to electric arc furnaces – remaking new steel from the UK’s abundant scrap – while the rest will help Tata, which also owns Jaguar Land Rover, build a gigafactory to make batteries for electric cars.

The company’s executives are to claim that Tata has been “an incredibly patient investor” in the UK steelworks since acquiring it in 2007, but that it has made no profit or dividends.

It is understood that the document contains the core arguments Narendran and Nair intend to make at the committee hearing. The committee will also hear evidence from Vaughan Gething, the minister for the economy for the Welsh government, as well as representatives of the Community, GMB and Unite unions.

Tata plans to import semi-finished steel slabs from sites in India and the Netherlands before the electric arc furnace is operational in 2027. The GMB is expected to argue that the steel imported while the EAF is being built is likely to have a high carbon content, even before the emissions generated in transit to the UK are taken into account.

The unions have previously criticised Tata for highlighting its emissions reduction efforts in the UK, while at the same time building a new, polluting blast furnace at Kalinganagar, in its home country of India.

UK 

Train drivers will keep striking to ‘raise profile’ of pay dispute, says Aslef 

Gwyn Topham Transport correspondent
Sun, 28 January 2024

Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

Train drivers will keep striking to “raise the profile” of their dispute after half a decade without a pay rise, the Aslef union has warned, before another week of rolling strikes across England.

Aslef’s general secretary, Mick Whelan, has said he believes that the government will make renewed efforts to see train companies use controversial new anti-strike laws, despite the union forcing a climbdown this time round.

An overtime ban will begin to disrupt services from Monday, before trains are halted for 24 hours at national train operators around England in rolling strikes from Tuesday.

Related: Train drivers call off extra strike days after LNER minimum service law U-turn

Drivers will strike at Southeastern, Southern/Gatwick Express, Great Northern, Thameslink and South Western Railway on Tuesday 30 January; at Northern Trains and TPE on Wednesday 31 January; at LNER, Greater Anglia and C2C on Friday 2 February; at West Midlands Trains, Avanti West Coast and East Midlands Railway on Saturday 3 February; and at Great Western, CrossCountry and Chiltern on Monday 5 February.

No trains at all are likely to run at most operators on their respective strike days, with other services likely to be much busier where they provide alternative routes for passengers.

The set of strikes was expected to be the first test of the minimum service levels legislation, designed to allow train operators to run 40% of the normal timetable. Only LNER, one of the three operators directly run by the Department for Transport, planned to use the new powers to demand that drivers break the strike. An immediate escalation by Aslef, which called five additional days of strikes at LNER, prompted a climbdown.

Rail industry bosses as well as unions had made clear their reservations in consultations and select committee hearings ahead of the strike laws being introduced, which could also be applied in health, education and firefighters disputes. Labour has said it will immediately repeal the laws if elected.

Speaking to the Guardian before the latest industrial action, Whelan said: “We made the point that it was unworkable, we believed it was terribly unsafe. We made the point, which was borne out by the government’s own impact assessment, that it would lead to more strife. Rather than trying to resolve the situation, they tried to introduce forced labour into the country, to our eternal shame.

“First time they’ve tried it, they’ve backed off. I’m of the view they’ll try it again. Nobody can tell us how to safely do it.”

Separately, the Public and Commercial Services Union said on Saturday it would use the Human Rights Act to challenge the minimum service law. The announcement was made by the PCS general secretary, Mark Serwotka, at a rally to mark the 40th anniversary of the ban on trade unions at the GCHQ headquarters.

After the threatened extended rail strikes on the London-Newcastle-Edinburgh mainline, and potential for more elsewhere, the more localised 24-hour disruption of rolling walkouts may be a relief for passengers. However, given the lack of progress in more than 18 months of strikes, what does Whelan hope to achieve?

“Well, there are two choices in life – to do something or do nothing. And we don’t actually have the choice to do nothing,” he said.

“I’ve got drivers who in February [will] have gone five years without a pay deal – half a decade. People who put their lives at risk during a pandemic, to get other key workers to work and move food and medicine around the country.”

The strikes would, Whelan said, “keep raising the profile of our dispute until somebody comes to the table to resolve it with us. I’d happily go back into talks tomorrow to find a way forward – even though we’ve been crapped on from a great height twice before when we’ve gone into long-term talks.

“We’ve gone in in good faith, and at the end the Rail Delivery Group and the government behaved dishonourably and deceitfully. Still, we have to find a way to resolve it.”

An overtime ban starting on Monday will apply at all of the companies throughout the strike period. It is likely to cause additional disruption for operators such as TransPennine Express that rely on rest day working.

The RDG has advised passengers to check before they travel, while those who have to travel should expect disruption, plan ahead and check when their first and last train will depart.

A spokesperson for the RDG said: “There are no winners from these strikes that will unfortunately cause disruption for our customers. We believe rail can have a bright future, but right now taxpayers are contributing an extra £54m a week to keep services running post-Covid.

“Aslef’s leadership need to recognise the financial challenge facing rail. Drivers have been made an offer which would take base salaries to nearly £65,000 for a four-day week before overtime – that is well above the national average and significantly more than many of our customers that have no option to work from home are paid.”

A DfT spokesperson said: “The transport secretary and rail minister have already facilitated talks that led to this fair and reasonable offer from industry – Aslef bosses should put it to their members so we can resolve the dispute, which has already happened with the RMT, TSSA and Unite unions.

“With passenger revenues not having recovered since the pandemic, the taxpayer has had to prop up the railways with £12bn in the past year alone – these strikes will not change the need for urgent workplace reforms that Aslef continue to block.”

Train strikes start this week: Here’s everything you need to know

Guy Taylor
Mon, 29 January 2024 

Train drivers have announced strikes ARE OFF

Brits are facing yet more disruption this week as train drivers from the Aslef union walk-out in an ongoing feud over pay and working conditions.

A combination of strikes and a ban on overtime working will take place on separate days between Monday 29 January and Tuesday 6 February, affecting 17 train companies.

There will be no services at all on some days, while others will see services start later and finish much earlier than usual, typically running between 7:30am and 6:30pm.


It comes despite the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT), which represents signalling staff, reaching a breakthrough agreement with government late last year, which averted disruption through Christmas and up to Spring.

Planned strikes at LNER scheduled to take place over the following week were called off after the operator agreed not to put minimum service levels in place during the primary set of walk-outs.
The dates:

Monday 29 January: overtime ban.

Tuesday 30 January: full strike action on Southeastern, Southern, Gatwick Express, South Western Railway, Great Northern and Thameslink.

Wednesday 31 January: full strike action on TransPennine Express and Northern.

Thursday 1 February: overtime ban.

Friday 2 February: full strike action on C2C, Greater Anglia and LNER.

Saturday 3 February: full strike action on Avanti West Coast, West Midlands Trains and East Midlands Railway.

Sunday 4 February: overtime ban

Monday 5 February: Strikes at Great Western, CrossCountry and Chiltern.

Tuesday 6 February: overtime ban.
Background:

Industrial action by both Aslef and the RMT union has caused disruption since May 2022, as high inflation stokes issues with worker’s pay packets and Britain’s railways continue to endure a chequered post-Covid recovery.

In April 2023, Aslef, which represents train drivers, rejected the offer of a four per cent pay rise over the next two years in exchange for a guarantee they would accept changes to driver training practices and negotiate changes in working schedules at individual operators.

The standard salary for rail workers was £45,919 in 2022, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). For train and tram drivers, median pay is just under £59,000.

Talks stalled throughout 2022 as the government and Aslef consistently accused the other party of failing to show up at the negotiating table.

Rail unions are also furious at new government legislation which enforces trade union workers to apply a minimum level of service in key sectors during strikes.

Mick Whelan, ASLEF General Secretary, said: “We have given the government every opportunity to come to the table but it is now a year since we had any contact from the Department for Transport. It’s clear they do not want to resolve this dispute.

“Many members have now not had a single penny increase in pay for half a decade, during which time inflation has soared and, with it, the cost of living. We didn’t ask for an increase during the pandemic, when we worked through lockdown, as key workers, risking our lives, to move goods around the country and enable NHS and other workers to get to work.”

A spokesperson for Rail Delivery Group said: “There are no winners from these strikes that will unfortunately cause disruption for our customers. We believe rail can have a bright future, but right now taxpayers are contributing an extra £54m a week to keep services running post covid.

“ASLEF’s leadership need to recognise the financial challenge facing rail. Drivers have been made an offer which would take base salaries to nearly £65,000 for a four-day week before overtime – that is well above the national average and significantly more than many of our customers that have no option to work from home are paid. Instead of staging more damaging industrial action, we call on the ASLEF leadership to work with us to resolve this dispute and deliver a fair deal which both rewards our people, and makes the changes needed to make services more reliable.

“While we are doing all we can to keep trains running, unfortunately there will be reduced services between Monday 29 January to Tuesday 6 February, so our advice is to check before you travel and follow the latest travel information.”

‘Their heads were nailed to the trees’: what was life – and death – like for Roman legionnaires?

Charlotte Higgins

The Guardian
Sun, 28 January 2024 

Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

It is one of the most chilling passages in Roman literature. Germanicus, the emperor Tiberius’s nephew, is leading reprisals in the deeply forested areas east of the Rhine, when he decides to visit the scene of the catastrophic defeat, six years before, of his fellow Roman, Quinctilius Varus. The historian Tacitus describes what Germanicus finds: the ghastly human wreckage of a supposedly unbeatable army, deep in the Teutoburg Forest. “On the open ground,” he writes, “were whitening bones of men, as they had fled, or stood their ground, strewn everywhere or piled in heaps. Near lay fragments of weapons and limbs of horses, and also human heads, prominently nailed to trunks of trees.”

Survivors pointed out the spot where Varus had killed himself, and the place where the military standards had been flaunted by the victors. “A living Roman army,” writes Tacitus of Germanicus’s visit, “had come to bury the dead men’s bones. No one knew if the remains he was burying belonged to a stranger or a comrade.” Three whole legions, perhaps 15,000 men, had been slaughtered – as well as the slaves, women and children who would probably have been with them.

The German rebels stopped Rome – and the story of their leader’s victory was later seized upon by the Nazis and today’s far right

Varus’s defeat in AD9 resonated in the later Roman imaginarium as a moment of unparalleled horror and humiliation. On terrain of their own choosing, the Roman military – professional, numerous, disciplined, well-equipped – had proved unbeatable for centuries. But, like many supposedly superior fighting forces since, from the Americans and their allies in Afghanistan to the Russians trundling south towards Kyiv, they were vulnerable when tricked, ambushed, trapped in a bottleneck and cut off from reinforcements.

The Varian disaster, as the Romans called it, did not mean that the empire ceased expanding. But it did mean that Rome’s borders never extended east of the Rhine. It had other consequences, too. Much later, during early stirrings of national self-consciousness in the 19th century, the victorious rebel leader Arminius began to be seen as the founding figure of German nationhood. His story was troublingly appropriated by the Nazis – and is being used again today by the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). One of its most prominent figures, Björn Höcke, has even been called a new Hermann (the modernised name for Arminius). Ancient history, perverted into myth, still vibrates in the present.

The site of the battle was almost certainly at Kalkriese in today’s Lower Saxony where, in 2002, a museum and battlefield park were opened. There is little to see in this wide field ringed by traces of what was once dense forest – but it is nevertheless a sobering spot. “It was killing fields as far as the eye can see,” says Stefan Burmeister, the museum’s director, describing the aftermath of the ambush. Bones and bodies may have decayed, but the soil is full of phosphates, the chemical traces of the dead, and if you strike the ground with a shovel, he says, there is “a fountain of finds”.

Rising above the museum is a viewing tower, from which the terrain becomes easier to read: the Romans were probably hemmed into a narrow strip of land between swamps to the north and ravines that cut through the chalk hills to the south. The place is deliberately free of any attempted reconstruction; the museum itself is a plain, minimalist building clad in oxidised metal, recalling the rusting iron of weaponry that would have been strewn across a battlefield. A pathway of metal slabs, some inscribed with fragments of Latin, runs across the site.

“It’s a difficult question, how to deal with such a dark historical place,” says Burmeister. “There was so much violence, so much brutality here, thousands of people killed. We don’t want to make it too positive.” By contrast, 100km to the south-east, stands the Hermannsdenkmal – a towering statue of Arminius/Hermann completed in 1875, in a spot once thought to be the battle site. Rising to a height of 53m, the monument radiates “shrill aggression”, to borrow a phrase from Neil MacGregor’s book Germany: Memories of a Nation. Raised in the era of the Franco-Prussian war, the statue waves his sword in the general direction of France. These days, AfD members sometimes gather there.

One of the paradoxes of the Kalkriese killing fields, says Burmeister, is that most of the archaeological finds, though numerous, are tiny, fragmentary. The theory, he says, is that the dead were “systematically stripped of their possessions – we have only the leftovers. Each of these Roman soldiers was a walking resource deposit.” But there are exceptions, among them a striking visor from a cavalry helmet in the shape of a man’s delicate-lipped face. And there is something even more remarkable, an extraordinary survivor that is about to go on display in Legion, a major new exhibition at the British Museum in London: namely, a complete Roman cuirass, uniquely well-preserved.

The cuirass, or body armour, was discovered right outside the museum in 2018. It was towards the end of an excavation, and entirely a surprise, when a metal detector beeped, indicating that something substantial was buried deep in the soil. A huge block of earth was extracted and 3D X-rayed, a process that took two days. After that, it was clear what they had – crushed and fragmentary, but spectacular. (The only very distant equivalent is pieces of armour found in Corbridge, Northumberland, though there is a promising brand-new find from Vienne in France, yet to be studied.)

The work of digging up the 403 fragments, of identifying how they belonged together, and of gently removing the corrosion from the surface, was a labour of love that took two years. “On a good day,” says Burmeister, “we would clean one square centimetre.” Why did it survive? Why was it not taken from the battlefield like everything else? “My interpretation is that this Roman legionnaire survived the battle and was paraded as a trophy,” he says. Shackles were found nearby. It is a grim notion.

Not far away from Kalkriese, in the delightful small Roman Museum in Haltern am See, it is good to be reminded that serving as a Roman soldier was a career choice and a life – albeit a career that brought with it enormous risks for the soldiers themselves, given the often violent exploitation of the people and lands that came under their occupation. Here, on the site of what is thought to have been the Roman military base of Aliso, are pots and pans, wine strainers and glass perfume bottles, keys and table legs, veiny ceramic phalluses (scholars disagree on their purpose, though the prevailing suggestion is they were for good luck) and even the lid of a medicine jar stating its contents as “the British root”. This is thought to be sorrel, rich in vitamins and iron.

This sense of ordinariness – that a soldier’s career might be mundane, and involve family life as well as violence – is a point strongly made in the British Museum exhibition, which takes as its spine the professional lives of two real soldiers from Egypt, Apion and Terentianus, whose letters on papyrus, recounting everything from career anxieties to requests for boots and socks, were preserved in the dry African sand. As in the modern Russian Federation, enlistment into the legions for less well-off citizens was a way out of poverty, the benefits worth even the dire risks. For non-citizens, serving as an auxiliary ended with the significant retirement benefit of enfranchisement – if it did not end in death.

She was his slave, then his freedwoman – then his wife

These men ate and drank, lived and loved. One of the most moving objects in the exhibition comes from cold, windy Britain: a monument raised to a woman called Regina, one of the Catuvellauni tribe, who lived in south-east England. It’s clear from the inscription – dedicated by her husband, Barates – that she was first his slave, then his freedwoman and wife. He was a Syrian, from Palmyra, at the opposite end of the empire, and the words are in two languages, Latin and Palmyrene.

Regina and Barates ended up together on the north-west frontier of the Roman empire, at the fort of Arbeia at what is now South Shields on Tyneside. She is shown sitting in a wicker chair, queenly like her name, wearing a necklace and bracelet, cradling a spindle in her lap and with a box of wool at her feet. She died aged 30. Carved in stone after her death, Regina gives us a gentle, fleeting glimpse of her life.

Legion: Life in the Roman Army is at the British Museum, London, from 1 February-23 June.