Yet more Tube strikes in the run up to Christmas risk making calls for a driverless Tube network irresistible, argues James Ford

As Father Christmas is making his list of who has been naughty and who has been nice this year, one suspects that, somewhere near the top of the naughty list, will be the name Eddie Dempsey. He is the General Secretary of the RMT union and the man who, this week, has announced his union’s intention of holding no fewer than eight days of strike action between November and February. Three of those strike days will be in the run-up to Christmas, including the last Saturday before Christmas Day (which is such a huge day for retailers that it is dubbed “Super Saturday” or even “Panic Saturday” in the industry). What a Grinch.

But Eddie Dempsey is not just risking getting a piece of coal in his stocking this year. Rising RMT militancy is making it harder and harder to justify the continued existence of Tube drivers at all. The more that the unions choose to inconvenience Londoners, the more sympathetic Londoners become to the idea of a driverless underground. We’ve had more than 160 days of strike action under Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, which is more than three times as many strikes as happened under both of his predecessors at City Hall combined. (And that is despite Khan ironically pledging that there would be zero strikes if he was elected Mayor).

It may surprise readers to learn that much of the Tube is already partially automated. On only three Tube lines – the Piccadilly, the Bakerloo and the Waterloo & City – do the drivers actually drive the trains. On the eight remaining lines, the so-called ‘drivers’ just open and close the doors in stations and the business of accelerating and braking is computerised. This is called Automatic Train Operation (ATO) and is known in industry jargon as “Grade of Automation 2” (GoA2). The Docklands Light Railway is GoA3 because, while it is driverless, a member staff – the Passenger Service Agent – is still onboard. The ultimate goal though must be fully unmanned operation (GoA4). That would make the London Underground strike-proof. GoA4 train systems are prevalent in other major cities: the Riyadh metro, the Dubai Metro, Singapore’s Mass Rapid Transit, the Vancouver SkyTrain, and the Copenhagen Metro. There are no fewer than 33 GoA4 metro systems in the USA and even Paris has three fully automated Metro lines. In the UK, however, fully automated transport systems are currently just used for airport transit, like Heathrow’s Terminal 5 Transit and the AirRail link in Birmingham. 

Traditionally, the biggest barrier to making the Tube fully driverless has been cost rather than public anxiety over driverless technology. Afterall, the DLR has been automated since 1987 and it was used for 90.8m passenger journeys in the last financial year. Sadly, new signalling, platform edge doors, more modern trains and other upgrades are required before the Underground can truly embrace going driverless. Transport for London (TfL) estimated that it would cost £20bn to fully automate the three oldest Tube lines (the Central line, the Bakerloo Line and the Piccadilly Line), with the Central Line alone costing an eye-watering £10bn to upgrade. 

But changes in the Budget last month might have made the high cost of adoption less of an issue than it was before. Plans to fully devolve business rates to local Mayors by the end of the decade could mean that an extra £9bn a year of funding is on the table. Given the GLA’s spending in 2026/27 was £22.9bn, that is a potential huge boost, even before we factor in the £10bn of extra borrowing that the Budget unlocked too. Whilst TfL had hoped to invest much of this windfall in extending Tube lines and improved stations, perhaps a significant proportion could instead be redirected to finally make the Tube driverless.

Currently, the RMT is able to hold the capital to ransom with impunity. Anti-strike legislation is the cheapest solution to London’s Tube union problem but the current Labour government overturned the law that would have given Londoners some respite from the union bullies. Going driverless would give London a Tube network that is more resilient and reliable, breaking the RMT’s stranglehold on the capital’s economy. And Eddie Dempsey might just get back on Santa’s nice list.