An RMT member in Service Control writes ...

Firstly, when station staff are taken away, their responsibilities have to go somewhere and a lot of them are being heaped onto controllers. We are being given increasing responsibility for operational procedures such as wrong direction movements (carried out over secure radio) and frankly I think we already carry a huge responsibility (and therefore concurrent potential for cock-up) and need more like we need holes in our heads.

Secondly, the general climate of fear has certainly not passed Service Control by, a controller has been sacked out of our room this year for something which a couple of years ago would have got him reduced in grade for a year at the very worst.

Thirdly, maintenance cuts mean that we're firefighting more failures and that's only likely to get worse. On the District they struggle at the moment to provide cover for all the callpoint train technicians and to fix enough trains to provide a full service for the weekday peaks. All of this just adds more pressure to controllers and makes our job more difficult.

Fourthly, we also are running effectively two controllers light (one vacancy and one covering service manager) so we're suffering from the same refusal to fill vacancies as elsewhere.