London cannot afford an ‘Autumn of Discontent’ of Tube strikes
The RMT has voted for further Tube strikes because TfL has offered them the wrong kind of four day week. But this dispute is more than just another farcical display of RMT intransigence, it represents a massive disruption to millions of Londoner’s commute and a huge cost to the London economy, warns Alex Challoner.
The RMT have voted for strikes on the Tube. If this feels like a very specific, London ‘Groundhog Day’ it is because we have all been here before. Since 2016 there have been around 160 days of strikes on the Tube.
We might expect the unions to permanently agitate. After all, their very raison d’etre is trying to get more money for less work regardless of the economic illiteracy implicit within that conceit. However, this proposed industrial action is even more Kafkaesque than just the usual tale of greedy, lazy workers. The RMT believe they have been offered the wrong sort of four-day week. Aslef, the capital’s other Tube union, takes a very different view of Transport for London’s (TfL) offer. They have described the deal offered as the “biggest improvement in working conditions for Underground train drivers in decades”. One might accuse the RMT of churlishness for rejecting such an offer. Or sheer bloody mindedness if you were less concerned about being polite.
City Hall also claims the blame
Bloody mindedness to one side, of course we cannot blame the RMT alone for this seemingly endless cycle of industrial discord. Blame must also be laid at City Hall’s door. This is a Mayor of London who swept into office claiming that there would be no Tube strikes on his watch. Instead, we have seen around triple the number of strikes that happened under both previous mayors combined.
And this is one issue that the mayor cannot attribute to the previous Conservative government. One of the final achievements of the Sunak administration was passing the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023. That law would have allowed bosses of key public services – including TfL – to sue the unions and sack employees who refused to work to deliver minimum service levels. But that law was overturned by the current Labour government last December when the hated Employment Rights Act 2025 came into effect.
Of course, eagle-eyed readers will have noted that Sunak’s anti-strike law was still on the books when the London Underground was hit by five days of strikes in September 2025… so the Mayor of London or the Prime Minister could have invoked it at any time they liked. But all we got from City Hall and Downing Street was the usual deafening silence.
The actual cost of Tube strikes
It is regular Londoners who pay the price for the mayor’s failure to deliver on his promises. Tube strikes are not just a transport inconvenience so much as a body-blow that London’s economy can ill afford. The Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) has estimated that strikes in September 2025 cost the London economy £230m in lost business. Further analysis from hospitality AI tech company Access Hospitality found that during those same 2025 strikes, hospitality bookings fell by up to 67 per cent and walk-ins dropped by nearly 70 per cent. The CEBR have estimated that strike action earlier this year cost the UK economy an additional £760m and between 320,000 and 630,000 lost working days. The Caterer estimated that there was an 18 per cent fall in revenue for London hospitality businesses during the week of the April strikes compared to the previous weeks. The revenue drop for pubs specifically was a staggering 54 per cent.
It looks like the race for City Hall in 2028 is heating up now that Conservative and Liberal Democrat politicians are throwing their hats into the ring. We should not be surprised if the issue of Tube strikes becomes a lively part of that debate. Faced with unreasonable Tube unions that insist upon holding the capital to ransom, ideas like new anti-strike legislation and driverless trains will gain traction with the public. And the mayor and the unions will have no-one to blame but themselves.
Alex Challoner is director of London Vision Network and a former prospective London Mayoral candidate