- Workers for Arriva Rail London were due to strike on Monday and Tuesday
Planned strikes next week by London Overground workers have been called off after a pay offer was improved.
RMT members working for Arriva Rail London on the London Overground were due to strike on Monday and Tuesday.
They will now vote on the new pay offer next week, the RMT has announced.
RMT general secretary Mick Lynch said: ‘London Overground members working for Arriva Rail London have made progress through their determination to take strike action.
‘The dispute is not over but we have made sufficient progress to suspend the action next week in order for our members to assess the new offer fully in a referendum.’
The news comes following an announcement by Sadiq Khan today for a £6.3million revamp of the London Overground.
The London Mayor has faced a furious backlash from outraged commuters and MPs who have branded the plan ‘predictable woke liberal nonsense’.
Under the bizarre project – which comes in the election year, rail lines will be given individual colours and names including Lioness, Mildmay, Windrush, Weaver, Suffragette and Liberty.
Mr Khan today defended his project and suggested it would save passengers from ‘nightmare’ journeys – but Tories quickly slammed the ‘virtue signalling nonsense’.
Susan Hall, Mr Khan’s Conservative opponent in May’s mayoral election, told MailOnline today: ‘1,000 people have been killed under his Mayoralty, and yet Sadiq Khan is only interested in this virtue signalling nonsense.
‘The only surprise from today’s announcement is that he hasn’t named one of them the Sadiq line.’
Ex-minister Paul Scully, Tory MP for Sutton and Cheam, told MailOnline: ‘Londoners just want a Mayor who can get them from A to B on time, at reasonable cost and in a degree of comfort, not just spraying a word cloud of virtue signalling at a cost of £6m of taxpayers’ money.
‘If he insists on renaming lines, he could have looked at sponsorship which would inject much-needed investment. But either way, at a time that we’re hearing about TfL’s delays to replacing old train stock, he’s just putting a new lick of paint over a creaking transport system rather than doing the job Londoners expect.’
And Tory MP Bob Blackman told MailOnline: ‘Another woke idea from a mayor who becomes more ridiculous every day.’
Further critics highlighted the cost given Transport for London (TfL) had been on the verge of bankruptcy before securing last-minute Government funding, and how Tube crime has soared by 56 per cent fuelled by a surge in thefts and robberies.
Most of the £6.3million budget will go towards updating customer information such as redesigning and redisplaying maps across all stations.
TfL will also be issuing new versions of the map in print and online, while public address announcements will be re-recorded and around 6,000 station direction signs are set to be updated.
The Mayor said today that the cash was ‘within the TfL budget already set aside’, and the change would make it ‘really easy’ to get across the 113 Overground stations.
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