Staff our stations!

Picture source here, reproduced via Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International license.

An article in the current On The Move, TfL's in-house staff magazine, praises TfL Transport Support and Enforcement (TSE) officers for helping reunite a family that had become separated.

It’s a heartwarming story, and shows the very real benefits of having visible, accessible staff on stations to help passengers. Many stations' staffing levels have been cut to the bone, meaning staff simply often aren't available to help with incidents.

But shouldn’t all staff working on Tube stations be employed by LUL, on LUL terms and conditions? TSEOs are paid considerably less than LUL CSAs or RCIs, and recently struck to demand parity. RMT and Unite, which represents workers in TfL's TSE department, need to work together to demand a levelling-up of terms and conditions.

And it’s a radical idea, but if transport was free, rather than a paid-for commodity, workers like the TSEOs currently employed in revenue enforcement could spend more time on genuinely helpful customer-service work.