TRAIN drivers are to vote on a pay deal which could end more than two years of industrial action.

The deal was hammered out in talks between their union Aslef and the new government’s Department of Transport.

Aslef general secretary Mick Whelan, assistant general secretary Simon Weller and executive committee President Dave Calfe said in a statement: “We are pleased that after being treated with utter contempt for the last two years by the privatised train companies, and the previous government that was pulling their strings, we finally have a new government – a Labour government – that listens and wants to make the railway work for staff, for passengers, and for the taxpayer.

“The offer is a good offer – a fair offer – and it is what we have always asked for, a clean offer, without a land grab for our terms and conditions that the companies, and previous government, tried to take in April last year.

“We will put it to members with a recommendation for them to accept.”

The no — strings three — phase offer is for a five per cent pay increase for 2019 to 2022; 4.75 per cent for 2022 to 2024, and 4.5 per cent for 2024 to 2025. The increases will be backdated.

Mr Whelan said: “We have achieved more in the last four weeks of a Labour government than we managed under a Tory government that set out to destroy us – first by refusing to meet us, then by insisting the companies could only offer us two per cent, then by offering us four per cent but with a land grab for all the terms and conditions we have spent 144 years negotiating with productivity and sweat.

“We have gone from people behaving dishonestly and deceitfully and trying to rip up all our terms and conditions to a group of people who seem to understand the interests of rail workers, the travelling public, and the taxpayer.”

The talks took place after two years of chaos in which the Tory government refused to negotiate, sabotaged potential settlements and even passed new legislation intended to break strikes – the Minimum Services Levels laws.

In Scotland and Wales, where rail operations are devolved to Holyrood and the Senned, and where the Westminster government had no control over negotiations, agreements were reached between rail unions and operators in 2022.

Strikes affected only England’s 14 private operators, which Aslef general secretary Mick Whelan previously said was evidence of the “dead hand” of the Tories in Westminster sabotaging any settlement in its attempts to break the union.

The strikes exposed the impotence of the Tories in their efforts to break the train drivers and their union through the extreme measure of legislation – the Minimum Service Levels laws introduced by Transport Secretary Grant Shapps.

Aslef simply defied them.

The only rail operator which attempted to apply the law against its striking drivers – LNER – was punished with an extra four days of strike action.

Throughout the strike, millions of pounds in taxpayers’ cash was handed to the rail privateers to compensate them for profits lost due to industrial action.

Compensation for lost profits was included in franchises awarded under the Tories’ original privatisation of the railways in 1994.