Nottingham Express Transit have announced that they will not be running any trams on any of four dates which are part of the strike by GMB Union members over this year’s proposed pay deal.
In a statement Nottingham Express Transit have said: “Whilst every effort has been made to minimise the impact on tram services, we’ve had to make the difficult decision to stop tram services on the days when staff will be on strike. We apologise for the inconvenience this will cause to our customers, especially those travelling to Nottingham’s Goose Fair.”
This means that no service will run at all on the following dates:
Saturday 26th September
Sunday 27th September
Friday 2nd October
Saturday 3rd October
In addition there may be delays to services between Monday 28th September and Thursday 1st October, this period is when union members will be taking “action short of strike” which will see staff potentially refusing to undertake overtime.
The strike has been called by the GMB after pay negotiations saw a final offer by NET rejected (this would have been a 3.3% increase, 7% for the lowest paid role, with the union holding out for 4.1%). Despite both NET and the union stating last week that they were open for further talks it would appear that nothing has moved further forward since the original statements.
Tram tickets will not be able to be used on bus services during the strike and there will be no extensions offered to tram passes to take into account the loss of days.
On the days that a tram service will be running a revised Goose Fair service will also run (as is normal to make sure that there are trams running more regularly at the more important times for the event).
From 28th September until 1st October trams will run:
0600-0700: From every 15 minutes
0700-1000: From every 8 minutes
1000-1500: From every 10 minutes
1500-2300: From every 8 minutes
2300-0000: From every 15 minutes