Christmas crisis as unions stay frosty
As the UK wraps up warm against the bitter cold, ministers huddled together in the cosy Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms today for crisis talks aimed at mitigating the impending fallout of pre-Christmas strikes.
A nationwide train strike begins tomorrow after the RMT union rejected Network Rail’s pay offer today. Royal Mail workers begin their two days of walkouts on Wednesday. And on Thursday, Royal College of Nursing staff in England, Wales and Northern Ireland will strike for the first time in their history.
The army is being trained to help Border Force staff at airports and ports, while around 750 military personnel from all three armed forces will start training to drive ambulances to cover for striking NHS workers later this month. As Maggie Pagano points out in her latest column, the wave of industrial action feels like the 1926 General Strike in all but name.
Running in parallel with the government’s strike conundrum are fears that the freezing weather could prompt energy rationing and blackouts.
Temperatures plunged as low as -15.7C on Sunday in Braemar, Scotland, and the Met Office has issued yellow weather warnings for snow and ice for large areas of the country.
Snow and ice are wreaking havoc on the UK’s transport network. The home counties have been worst affected, with the M25 grinding to a halt in Hertfordshire and motorists stranded for up to eight hours after heavy snowfall. More than 100 flights due to serve UK airports were cancelled on Sunday and Monday – with Stansted, Gatwick, Luton and London City among the worst affected.
As the chill swept across the country, National Grid put two coal power stations onto emergency standby in case demand for electricity exceeded UK power network capacity.
But it stood down the two plants this morning, having judged the extra capacity wouldn’t be needed, in part due to an anticipated pick-up in wind power in the coming days.
The two coal plants in North Yorkshire are owned by energy giant Drax Group, which has converted much of the site to run on “biomass”. It’s the same Drax that was revealed in October to be cutting down primary forests in Canada and importing the wood chips to burn, which – incredibly – is classed as renewable energy.
Drax was due to shut its coal units this autumn before the government stepped in. The standby units at its North Yorkshire plants operate under so-called “winter contingency contracts”, meaning the power cannot be bid on in the open market. Instead, the units can be asked to come online by the grid operator, National Grid, to relieve tight supplies.
National Grid has another emergency scheme up its sleeve – paying smart meter owners to cut their energy usage during peak times. It’s carrying out a trial of the scheme between 5pm and 7pm today, which could pave the way for hundreds of thousands of households to adapt their behaviour in exchange for cash.
So far, the energy crisis has been averted. The same cannot be said of the strikes.