New train drivers’ strike to coincide with Conservative Party conference in Manchester

Published

12 months ago

September 15, 2023

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Train drivers will take strike action on 30 September and 4 October to coincide with the Conservative Party’s conference in Manchester, a union has announced.

Aslef said the companies affected by the strikes include Avanti West Coast, Chiltern Railways, c2c, CrossCountry, East Midlands Railway, Greater Anglia, GTR Great Northern Thameslink, Great Western Railway, Island Line, LNER, Northern, Southeastern, Southern/Gatwick Express, South Western Railway, TransPennine Express and West Midlands Trains.

As well as striking, drivers on the rail network will also follow an overtime ban on 29 September and from 2 to 6 October – which the union said would “seriously disrupt the network” due to what they said was the privatised train firms’ failure to “employ enough drivers to provide a proper service”.

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The fresh industrial action will come as a blow for Rishi Sunak, who will have his first Conservative Party conference as leader and prime minister disrupted by separate strikes by junior doctors and consultants.

Transport Secretary Mark Harper immediately criticised the new strikes and accused them of being “politically motivated”.

Posting on X, formerly known as Twitter, he said there was an “offer on the table” to increase their pay to £65,000.

“Still they strike, putting their own jobs at risk,” he wrote.

Mick Whelan, Aslef’s general secretary, said that while union members “regret having to take this action – we don’t want to lose a day’s pay or disrupt passengers as they try to travel by train – the government, and the employers, have forced us into this position”.

He added: “Our members have not had a pay rise for four years – since 2019 – and that’s not right when prices have soared in that time.

“Train drivers, perfectly reasonably, want to be able to buy now what they could buy four years ago.”

Junior doctors and consultants in England announced they will take joint strike action for the first time over four days across this month and next – including on 4 October.

The strikes by Aslef are just the latest development in the ongoing battle between the union and the government over pay and working conditions.

There has already been severe disruption to the rail network this summer, with a 24-hour strike in early September coinciding with the last weekend of the summer holidays.

Business

Apollo-owned ABC Technologies in £800m raid on London-listed auto supplier

Published

7 hours ago

September 13, 2024

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Apollo-owned ABC Technologies in £800m raid on London-listed auto supplier

A London-listed automotive components supplier has become the latest British-based company to draw overseas takeover interest after receiving a series of offers from a Canadian rival.

Sky News has learnt that TI Fluid Systems has received at least two bid proposals from ABC Technologies Holdings, a Canadian competitor.

City sources said on Friday evening that the second of the offers had valued TI Fluid Systems at 180p-a-share – a significant premium to its closing price on Friday of 145.8p.

Shares in the company rose by more than 7% on Friday amid market rumours about a potential bid.

TI Fluid Systems floated in London in October 2017 at a price of 255p-a-share.

One source said the company’s board, which is chaired by Tim Cobbold, a former boss of banknote printer De La Rue, was unlikely to seriously consider a proposal unless it was pitched at closer to 200p-a-share.

Both parties are likely to come under pressure from the Takeover Panel to confirm the interest from ABC Technologies over the weekend, or at the latest on Monday morning.

TI Fluid Systems operates from 98 manufacturing locations in 27 countries.

It specialises in the production of fluid handling and thermal management systems.

The company traces its roots back to 1922, when it began trading as Harry Bundy and Company.

A string of London-listed companies have agreed to takeovers by foreign or private equity bidders this year, the latest of which came this week when Centamin, a gold miner, accepted a £1.9bn offer from AngloGold Ashanti of South Africa.

On Friday, Apollo and TI Fluid Systems both declined to comment.

Business

Mail Online and Sun take axe to US-based workforces

Published

14 hours ago

September 13, 2024

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Mail Online and Sun take axe to US-based workforces

Two of Britain’s biggest newspaper publishers are taking the axe to their US workforces, slashing scores of jobs in the latest evidence of mounting financial pressures across the media sector.

Sky News has learnt that News UK, the publisher of The Sun, and DMGT, owner of the Daily Mail, have this week announced sweeping internal restructurings in their digital operations on the other side of the Atlantic.

Industry sources said on Friday the two companies were cutting significant numbers of employees in the US, where The Sun launched an American edition online four years ago.

By coincidence, the two sets of cutbacks are understood to have been launched on the same day.

DMGT launched Dailymail.com in the US in 2010, and is thought to employ about 200 people there, a reduction from roughly 260 seven years ago.

One insider said the DMGT layoffs represented just under 10% of its US workforce, while the proportion of The Sun’s US staff being let go is understood to be much higher.

A source close to News UK, which is part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, denied it was as high as 80%.

The company is thought to employ about 100 people on The Sun’s US platform.

One media analyst said the redundancies, which have not been announced publicly, were a reflection of the “intense” pressure on news media brands, even in areas where their digital audiences had gained significant momentum.

A spokesperson for The Sun said: “The US Sun has been an incredibly successful business, driving billions of page views.

“However the digital landscape has experienced seismic change in the last 12 months and we need to reset the strategy and resize the team to secure the long term, sustainable future for The Sun’s business in the US.”

A spokesperson for Associated Newspapers, the DMGT subsidiary which publishes the Daily Mail, said in response to an enquiry from Sky News: “We have made a small number of job cuts in some areas of our US editorial department.

“This was a difficult, but necessary decision, which will enable us to continue to invest in areas where we can grow our audience.”

Business

Investigation into potential second Post Office scandal will be ‘positive’ for sub-postmasters

Published

15 hours ago

September 13, 2024

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Investigation into potential second Post Office scandal will be 'positive' for sub-postmasters

The lawyer for those affected by Capture software predating the faulty Horizon system says his “belief” is that the “report is going to be positive”.

Neil Hudgell, a solicitor at Hudgell Solicitors, is representing over 40 former sub-postmasters who used Capture in the 1990s.

Dozens who used it claim they were wrongfully accused of stealing money from their Post Office branches, similar to the Horizon scandal.

Mr Hudgell told Sky News: “We need to see the report, we need to consider options.”

“But clearly, if it is a positive report”, he added, “and we are going to start talking about exoneration and compensation, then we need a process to reflect the ageing demographic of those involved, ie it needs to be quick, and we need to figure out what the quickest route is”.

Capture was introduced to some branches from 1992 – and was the predecessor to the faulty Horizon accounting software.

Under Horizon, hundreds of sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted between 1999 and 2015.

What’s happening with the report?

An independent investigation into Capture began in the summer and has now concluded.

It was carried out by risk advisory and financial solutions company Kroll.

The report has now been passed to the Department for Business and Trade.

Former sub-postmaster Steve Marston believes he was falsely convicted of theft due to “glitches” in Capture software.

The personal toll

Shortfalls of £79,000 were found at his branch in Greater Manchester.

Earlier this year, he met the then Post Office minister Kevin Hollinrake when it was agreed that an independent IT expert would assess evidence claiming to “prove” Capture software was faulty.

Mr Marston said that “as a group” he believes those affected have provided “an overwhelming amount of evidence to show that Capture was totally unfit for use and should never have been released”.

He claims that sub-postmasters were told that “Capture would make our lives easier and that we would no longer have to do manual accounting as we had in the past”.

He says he was given the software by the Post Office “and basically left to get on with it without any sort of guidance”.

He describes “extra stress” and that he and his wife “are struggling” whilst waiting for the conclusions to the Kroll report.

Campaigners discovered old floppy disks earlier this year with the Capture software on them and passed them on to investigators.

Mr Marston, and other sub-postmasters, say they show that errors in the system could generate false shortfalls in accounts and believe Capture evidence was used in his prosecution.

They also claim that it appears that errors occurred when upgrades were made to the software.

Other factors such as power cuts are also thought to be another possible reason for faults.

The Kroll report is due to be released in the next few weeks.

A Department for Business and Trade spokesperson said: “We will thoroughly examine Kroll’s report into the Capture system and its impact on postmasters and set out next steps in due course.”