THE planned strike by Network Rail maintenance workers after Easter has been called off. The company said the RMT and TSSA had taken a ‘sensible’ step.

However, the RMT said it had abandoned all action for the time being because Thursday’s court decision banning the signallers’ strike due to ballot irregularities had thrown the validity of the maintenance ballots into question as well.

A full reballot of all the staff affected is being arranged.

Some 15,000 maintenance staff had been due to walk out over the same period that 6,000 signallers had been set to stage two four-hour strikes each day, disrupting morning and evening train services.

The signallers' strikes were declared illegal when a High Court judge ruled that the RMT ballot had been seriously flawed. RMT general secretary Bob Crow defended the details of the ballot, saying that the recipients' details had been checked as carefully as possible, and that some of the information had come from Network Rail.

Even so, Network Rail told the court that some ballot papers had been sent to a signalbox which closed in 1965, and to another which burnt down in 2009.

The strikes by maintenance workers, from Tuesday to Friday, were not expected to cause significant disruption, unlike the signallers' action, but Network Rail said: ‘Although this strike would have had little to no impact on services, the news that the union has taken the sensible step of cancelling the action is welcome. There are still issues to resolve and we look forward to sitting down with the unions next week to continue negotiations and find an amicable agreement that will settle both the signallers’ and maintenance workers’ disputes.’

However, the RMT Executive said it believed that the judgement had been ‘highly political’, and that there were doubts about some of the information which Network Rail had provided to the court.

In a statement, it continued: ‘The General Secretary is instructed to reballot all our Operations and Infrastructure members as soon as practically possible. The General Grades Committee is to be reconvened on 7 April to lay down a timetable on this reballot and also to receive the full legal judgement. We are still in dispute and are determined to fight on in defence of jobs, terms and conditions and for a safe railway.’

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