After taking office as transport secretary for the newly elected Labour government on July 3, Louise Haigh quickly lived up to the new motto she had introduced for her department: “Move fast and fix things.” For two very long years, British rail travelers had endured strikes and industrial action by rail workers’ unions that neither the privatized passenger service operators nor the Conservative government which subsidized them seemed interested in ending.
By Aug. 14, Haigh had brokered a pay deal for rail workers of 4.5 percent to 5 percent per year covering the period 2022-25. The industrial strife was over, and not before time, especially for the country’s meetings sector. Even as early as February 2023, the Meetings Industry Association estimated that the dispute, which began in June 2022, had caused £337 million of canceled business and £552 million of postponed business for its sector.
When Haigh finally ended the dispute, the association UKHospitality, whose members include hotels and serviced apartments, estimated total damage to its sector over the entire course of the strikes at £3.5 billion. Research under the previous government among people using rail for work during 2023 found that 32 percent of them had been unable to get to meetings, while 70 percent of rail commuters had their work disrupted—all this after two years of travel suppressed by Covid.
A former trade union official who became a Member of Parliament in 2015 at the age of only 27, Haigh had acted as shadow transport secretary for the Labour opposition since 2021. On assuming the actual role in government, she also awarded herself an unofficial title: passenger-in-chief. Haigh started work on renationalizing the U.K. rail network and, on the aviation side, toughened consumer protection for air passengers by giving the Civil Aviation Authority the power to fine airlines. She also launched a task force to improve air travel for disabled passengers.
Haigh was set for a year of difficult decisions about airport expansion in 2025 but never had to face them. On Nov. 29 she resigned abruptly as transport secretary after it emerged she had been given a conditional discharge by magistrates in 2013 for a fraud offence. She was replaced by Heidi Alexander.
