North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

Indeed and that's the case for the other heritage railway on which I volunteer. The NYMR is fortunate in having a doctor who is willing to undertake medicals at a significantly reduced rate but he can only cope with part of the need. Medicals are not an option. Great if you have enough medically qualified professionals willing to do them as volunteers but if not the only option is to pay. There's also been demand from volunteers for medicals to be available at locations nearer where they live which adds to the pressure to use external providers.

 

With regard to the medical aspects maybe back in the day, but I'd be surprised if many of the mediumto large railways are getting medicals done by volunteers now. Maybe it's done by the local surgery at advantageous rates but not free. The NYMR presumably needs a national rail standard medical for it's train crew as well.

 

Do you have actual hard, real, tangible costs of how much it costs to manage volunteer? For example, you mention medical costs for safety-critical operating staff: absolutely true (though of course paid staff would also need similar if they do similar roles). But you don't, for example, need a medical every year: if a medical costs (say) £150, I get one every five years (rising in a few years to one every 2 years I think), so my cost to the railway for medicals is £30/year, rising after I pass age 60 to £75 per year.

I'd be somewhat surprised if the average cost of managing a volunteer exceeded about £100 per year - but maybe you have figures, not just vague scary prognostications?

Now let's look at your other figures. If the NYMR could cope with 5 or 6 paid signalmen to do the work of 45 volunteers, then that gives a staff:volunteer replacement ratio of about 8 or 9 to 1. So the cost of those volunteers might be £800 - £900 per year for every full time staff member. Whereas the paid FTE, with pension contributions, employers NI etc, is probably going to cost you upwards of £30k per year even if they are on fairly low salaries in the mid 20s. (A person aged 21+ on national minimum wage working a 37.5 hour week costs about £26k per year in salary and NI; probably another £1k or so in pension contributions. But good luck getting someone on national minimum wage to act as a skilled signalman as a full time job).

So just to replace your volunteer signalmen with paid staff not much above the national minimum wage, 45 volunteers might cost you well under £5,000 per year. And 6 paid staff on just above the minimum wage might cost £180k per year. And that is an absolutely best case scenario on staff costs; in reality they would likely be much higher. Replacing all your 1000 volunteers even at a 10:1 ratio with paid staff all on national minimum wage would cost close to £3m, vs. ca. £100k to manage them currently. In an organisation already losing £500k per year ...

No wonder the NYMR is in a financial pickle if that is the quality of financial thinking going on! Yes of course having a volunteer costs money, no-one has said that they are free. But even allowing a "many to one" replacement with paid staff, the cost of a small paid staff will far outstrip the cash cost of the larger number of volunteers they might replace.

Tom

 

At the SVR, safety critical medicals take place on the railway, at the Kidderminster office, and are undertaken by GPs who volunteer their time.

 

With respect Tom I think that's stating the obvious. I might disagree with some of your figures but not the principle. ( In particular medicals can be a lot more expensive than your quited figure and for older volunteers can be as frequent as every year). The point was that volunteers have a cost and while it may be small in relation to that of paid staff it's still considerable simply becuase of the number of volunteers involved.

 

So why do you so consistently state how expensive volunteers are, yet remain silent on how much more expensive paid staff are?

You would be bust in short order without your 1000 volunteers, yet all you ever stress is how much of a burden they are.

(No doubt to be followed by: “one of our members just left us a £100k legacy. You wouldn’t believe just how much admin that caused us …”)

Tom

 

That's unfair! All I've done is to challenge the suggestion that they are cost free resource.

 

But no-one suggested that!

Your constant tone is that volunteers are expensive, but is never qualified by the follow-up statement “… but even so, far cheaper than an equivalent level of paid staff, and we absolutely couldn’t survive without them”.

Tom

 

It’s a question of tone and balance as others have said also. Your tone doesn’t convey what you say you mean, and you give undue weight to things which need to be said, but do not require hammering home.

Membership fees don’t support the railway significantly and that’s something that leadership needs to communicate in moderation. The important thing though is to have a strategy about how you make use of that base of support. Which doesn’t start by upsetting them I would suggest.

Over stating the self evident truth that volunteers aren’t completely without cost starts to ridicule your own argument. You would need to spend a lot on PPE, external Medical’s and management to get close to a full time member of staff. In fact I bet all your volunteer management costs don’t equal the employment cost of your two most senior members of paid staff.

 

My thoughts entirely. It will not be a clean comparison for all sorts of reason, but it would be instructive to see a cost per FTE of paid staff and per volunteer, covering pay, tax, NI, support costs, etc. That would make the comparison real, rather than what feels like special pleading for "but volunteers have a cost".

With respect, your consistent tone of argument has been far more than just that. Whenever a challenge to the employee/volunteer ratio has been made, the answer has always been "but volunteers cost"; whenever a view expressed as to the value of membership, "but the cash return is small". Against that, the statements (and, for the record, I believe they're made in good faith) about the importance of volunteers and culture get lost in the background.

If I were to read your posts, in aggregate, the impression I would leave with is that NYMR is best run by a small paid staff with a very limited volunteer function. That operation would be focused almost exclusively on Whitby traffic and look for optimum efficiency rather than actually being a form of living museum. Anything more than the entry level experience (probably diesel + Mk1) would be at a premium charge.

As a heritage volunteer yourself, who gives extensively of himself, I know that to be less than the truth. Yet it is still the impression I'm left with.

I'm sure that current and former staff and volunteers have a range of views, and many are quite content to just keep doing what they've been doing. But if just one says what @Steve reported upthread, just one, then something is badly awry. And the fix for that is not to focus on who may post on social media, or to do some outreach, or even management by walking around, but to reflect very deeply indeed on the corporate culture and why it is that the leadership have left even only some people fearful. Before you get a whistleblowing case, or a disaffected volunteer goes public as they have elsewhere.

 

Somewhat different to self assessment though is it not?

 

Two sentences that sum up the entire argument in a nutshell! Of course it isn't just down to one person, but he is very much the public face of it. I hate to sound like a stuck record, but the NYMR is in increasingly desperate need of people who understand its problems and how to deal with them, as it is currently lurching from crisis to crisis, and it is clear that the present management, particularly those at the top of it do not.

 

Then you will have to prepare to be surprised; signalmen on the railway on which I volunteer self-certify their medical fitness, and that is written into the SMS. Footplate staff and shunters have medical exams.

 

Interesting! Is the ORR comfortable with that?

 

Presumably they have no objection. The railway's standard follows the guidance in the HRA document on fitness assessment for safety critical workers, and risk assessment based on the advice of appropriately qualified medics.

 

You seem to be implying that somehow the membership should be covering the costs of running the railway. No-one ever said that the membership was a cash cow, and your statements are becoming more and more ridiculous in order to justify your views.
Please take a step back and have a rethink about how you come across and how that would come across to someone if you said it to their face.
As others have said, railways which are losing money are cutting staff and reducing spending, but your plan seems to be to keep employing the same numbers (if not more), kill off heritage rolling stock, abandon the use of intermediate stations and put on more and more diesels. Is a comparison with a certain Doctor appropriate?

 

The NYMR has parted company with numerous staff members and is cutting back expenditure hard which is not to everyone’s liking.

 

Modernisation Plan 2.0; The NYMR Edition

(well, it is seventy years...)