Episode 14 Inside Out

Now on BBC News, Inside Out.

Hello there, I'm Matthew Wright, and you're watching Inside Out.

Here's what's coming up on today's show:

The union wants guards to be responsible for train doors,

but Southern Rail management want this to be the drivers' job.

With frustrated commuters caught in the middle,

we ask who's right.

No one is more tired of this story than southern commuters,

so why such chaos over who pushes the button?

We expose the job-seeking scam that has defrauded hundreds of Londoners.

Do you know how many people I've spoken to who have been

affected by your fraud?

Who have lost thousands and thousands of pounds?

And we pay tribute to Britain's first black publishing house,

still going strong after 50 years.

I do not believe that multicultural education would have been possible

but for the work that this book shop and others like it actually did.

For the last six months, commuters on Southern Rail have been

enduring strikes, cancelled services and skeleton timetables.

The key issue at stake?

Whether drivers or guards are responsible for closing

the train doors.

The RMT union claim the guards also have a vital role to play in terms

of passenger safety, but in Europe they already have

unmanned fully automatic trains, while British Rail introduced

driver-only ones in the 1980s.

So how did Southern end up in such a mess?

We sent Mark Jordan to investigate.

Another week of strikes and southern discomfort.

It is the tale of the sad little green train, loved by no one.

Managers said it was an efficient, and unions warned it

would injure people if the drivers close the doors.

The striking guards said that was their job.

The commuters were furious.

In all the land, no one had worst punctuality

than the green trains of Southern.

No one is more tired of the story than southern commuters.

So why such chaos over who pushes the button?

How did a railway grind to a halt over who shuts the doors?

In Europe, I'll meet those already running unmanned automatic trains.

Here on Southern, that is for another generation,

because the UK row over guards has been running for half a century.

The first of London Transport's automatically-driven trains...

1969 and London Underground opens the Victoria Line.

Automatic, no guards.

One man will be in charge of each train...

Today the entire London tube network runs without guards,

in tighter space, underground, and carrying more passengers every

day than the entire UK rail network.

34 years ago, British Rail fought for the same.

These brand-new electric trains sitting idly

in the sidings at Bedford sum up British Rail's problems.

The trains can't be put into service because of a continuing row

over operations...

Sound familiar?

In 1982, British Rail finally won this dispute

on what is now the Thameslink and here is where things get odd.

This is Brighton.

Two trains here from London.

This is a Thameslink.

It has been running driverless since 1982.

This is Southern.

They run with a guard.

Let's take Brighton Station.

You say keeping the guards is all about safety,

so are the public risking their safety travelling on the tube,

London Overground, or Thameslink, because none of them have guards?

They don't have guards and we have never accepted the guards should be

removed in any other situations.

Trap and drag incidents, where people are caught,

are becoming more and more prevalent.

What the train companies and the Government want you to do

is just accept the risk.

We do not accept that we need to have a risk.

But Transport For London claim that incidents actually reduced

when they turned their packed overground planes to driver only.

The industry rail safety standards board was set up

to prevent accidents.

From the research we have done over the last 15 years, we are very clear

that operating with driver-only is no more risky than having a guard

present, and in many cases is actually safer.

He says safer because video in the driver's cab now gives a good

view of every door and rules out driver-guard miscommunication.

The RMT dispute this.

Deadlock.

But if guards accept Southern's no-redundancies offer and become

customers supervisors with other responsibilities, any

of their future strikes would no longer stop trains.

Most of the arrangements where drivers are operating trains

alone at the moment are actually agreements that

were reached by British Rail before privatisation occurred.

But weren't we told privatisation would speed towards a modern,

efficient railway?

Not it seems if strikes risk ticket revenue and profit.

There was no incentive to lose the guard, but then the Government

gave Southern a unique fixed-fee contract, with no loss

of revenue for strikes.

Your contract means that when there is a strike

you still get paid.

The lost ticket revenue is picked up by the taxpayer, the Government.

Is that correct?

We have a very unique franchise in the way this one is operated

and all fares and revenues do go to the Government.

There is still a cost to our reputation when we have strikes.

Southern claimed the deal was to cover uncertainty over

the London Bridge redevelopment.

Overcrowding, the late...

That these angry commuters believe the Government

and Southern are in a pact.

We are not able to even start to demystify the close

relationship between them and the Department for Transport.

They are secretly backing them because that is their agenda.

When they deliver new rolling stock, when they procure new rolling stock,

that is a Trojan horse.

They put through on the back of it is to de-staff the trains

and the de-staff the stations.

They call that modernisation.

I'm saying to the Government we should be stripping this private

company of this franchise.

Talk to us, we are willing to take over the suburban trains.

Can it be right that the Government ministers

have their heads in the sand?

I have met so many commuters who actually hate your company.

That is a terrible position to be in, isn't it?

I totally sympathise with our customers and this is why

we need to make these changes very quickly now so we can bring

everything to an end.

If I just open this cabinet...

In London this summer, something much more radical

was attempted on the Jubilee Line.

TFL ran a test on a driverless tube in a depot.

It is an early precursor to some of the agenda that the employers

and the Government has got about dehumanising the railway.

That we are on the alert and trying to be vigilant about it.

Drivers earn about ?50,000 a year, that is 8000 more than some second

officers piloting easyJet flights.

As TFL prepares to spend ?16 billion on trains

capable of full automation, the RMT say their drivers are going nowhere.

Here in Paris, they are hardly any immune to the old

industrial dispute, but on their busiest commuter line

they have done something that leaves TFL and Southern in the dark ages

of railway technology.

This is line one on the Paris Metro.

It carries more people every day than the entire

Southern Rail franchise.

The trains have no guards, no drivers, they are totally

automatic with 100% timing.

It is very safe and very comfortable for them so it is not

a big issue, in fact.

While Southern battle over who pushes the door button, this

entire line is driven from here.

Any big event means more trains at the click of a mouse.

It is quite amazing to think up to 750,000 people a day

are speeded to wherever they are going from this

one control room.

In Paris, they are already automating the next line.

Here in Haworth Heath, the chaos of Southern Railway has

forced Clare to move out.

Fourth day of the week and it has taken you three hours a night to get

home, you're just ready to burst into tears.

I would've been at risk of losing my job.

Six months on, perhaps the greatest insult is both sides still claim

the fight is for the passenger.

We actually don't care whose fault it is any more, we just want

trains to run on time and we want our lives back.

Mark Jordan reporting there.

Still to come on today's show:

It was actually in the Black Panthers that I discovered Black

literature my interest developed.

Not only did I discover a whole range of books about history,

slavery, poetry from Africa and the Caribbean, it just opened up

a whole new world for me.

When you are hunting for a job, it can be a great feeling

being called up and offered a position with decent

salary attached.

Sometimes it pays to be on your guard because an undercover

investigation for Inside Out London has exposed a sophisticated

employment scam where candidates are offered positions in nonexistent

companies, a scam which has, in all likelihood, fooled hundreds

hundreds of job-seekers out of thousands of pounds.

Now the special report.

These men and women have been taken in by one man.

I want to welcome you to HTS, I'm John Phillips.

He oversees a job scam and sophisticated fraud.

You are very well aware of what your employment

life will be.

We know it sucked in hundreds of people who paid thousands of pounds.

These are just a few of them.

I've rarely come across someone whose scam was so realistic and had

such a huge impact on his victims.

What we're going to do is give you a front row seat

on how that scam works.

Some highly qualified, some just starting.

All were desperate to work in HR and progress their careers.

They place their CV on job websites that can be openly

accessed by employers.

Later they got contacted by John Phillips, in charge

of a large HR company, offering them what they

thought was their dream job.

The job was an admin assistant role, which was supposed to be

based in London Bridge.

I was going to be paid ?24,750.

I couldn't be happier, my family was happy for me,

and me personally, I just felt like finally I had made it.

To understand this scam, we are going to apply.

Our undercover reporter, we called her Jane Smith,

prepares a realistic CV and posts it online.

On the kinds of sites that are victims have used.

A few days later, a job description and an e-mail from one company,

Premier Employment.

And then a call confirming this to a man called John Phillips.

Hello there.

I'm just calling back about a job.

OK.

I have HR, it is 24,000, that role is 9-5, Monday

to Friday, 20 days location.

We find a website and see it is registered on companies house.

All the job-seekers are told to come for a final interview before signing

a contract and commencing work.

Our reporter is on her way to an office in the

heart of the city.

But no sign of John at all.

We are met by someone else, Tiffany.

So basically they will put ?100 a month into your pension

and you should be able to join the private health care

plan and also they give you a free gym membership.

One, two...

Next is the crux of how Phillips makes his money.

All were asked by different assistants to pay for accreditation

to work at the company.

We hand over our accreditation fee but are told it will be refunded.

And then you get back 200...

And she said I would have to pay ?480.

And you need to bring the cash in order for you to

start employment.

You need to pay upfront before you start the job.

So as the meeting with the undercover reporter was taking

place inside this building, I was waiting outside.

Now we have heard from other victims that when it comes to actually

receiving the money, John is nowhere to be seen.

So what I happened to record with my phone while waiting outside

is very interesting indeed.

I spot John Phillips, seemingly running operations

from outside, and if that is in any doubt,

look who comes in.

Tiffany.

Who we have given them money for so-called accreditation.

She gives it to John.

Initially we thought she might have been part of it,

the later we discovered that she herself was being conned

with a fake job and is just as much a victim as everyone else.

This lady, Lucille, not her real name, was exactly

like Tiffany, a senior manager.

John persuaded her to pay for premises from her own funds

to interview candidates.

Her task, to get the accreditation money off them.

One week I did five payments, they just give it.

I just finished the interview and go back to John and give him the money

back as cash.

?2,000, probably more.

Then, devastating, when the whole thing turned out to be a lie.

It is hard to trust yourself when you have been through this

and just get fooled like that.

I do think we need to get him to stop.

We receive a detailed list of instructions to start work.

Our job, to find other candidates.

We are sent a set of e-mails and numbers to call.

There are 30 numbers and e-mails here and what is clever,

so to speak, about this is were we to do our job and invite

all of these people for interview it would mean

about ?7,000 for Mr Phillips.

He is aware of the cash value of our calls and gets jumpy

when we don't make progress.

You are not moving fast enough for me.

No, well I don't understand what I'm supposed to be doing.

Check your e-mails, you have not sent any e-mails from the e-mail

we gave you.

You're not paying attention.

Are you reading what the company is sending you?

Yes, I am, I read it, but some things were missing.

We investigate Mr Phillips.

He uses several aliases.

John Phillips,Nathan Phillips as well.

When I posed as a client...

Can I check what your name is?

Dale Barnett.

Pardon?

Dale Barnett.

The firms he has set up have professional looking websites.

We find more than ten, some using fake company directors.

And we speak to numerous job-seekers who have never been paid.

With reports online suggesting this scam has been going on for years,

with possibly hundreds of victims.

For these men and women, it wasn't just the money,

it was staking everything on a full-time job

and all that involved.

I wouldn't say it is exactly depression, but it was a state

where I was completely stressed financially and I didn't know how

to cope with life in general.

There is no company and there is no office, there is nothing behind.

How can you possibly do that?

Where is your humanity?

John Phillips still thinks we are going to arrange him

people to be interviewed.

And usually he agrees to meet us in person,

to push us to do the calls to get him the candidates.

We would find a way to make money at every possibility.

The world is very competitive.

For us to pay you, that is recycling,

we don't throw anything away.

He says goodbye, but now we seize the moment to ask him some

questions of our own.

I'm from the BBC.

I just wondered if you could tell me all about the high levels

of fraud you been committing against many

many people by lying about various jobs?

I don't know what you're talking about.

You don't want him talking about?

We have been recording you order the last few months offering people

jobs in fictitious companies.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Are you aware that what you're doing is an incredibly serious

fraud, Mr Phillips?

I don't know what you're talking about.

Do you know how many people I've spoken to who had been

affected by your fraud, who have lost thousands

and thousands of pounds?

What you have to say to them, Mr Phillips?

No answer, I don't know what you're talking about.

I've never seen a pernicious kind of fraud as like you

are perpetuating.

I'm not going to talk to the BBC.

I think he is scum.

I can't believe he is getting away with it.

I don't know how we can sleep at night.

I don't know if he hates people.

He is a horrible human being.

Since our investigation, John Phillips has gone underground

leaving behind a trail of damage for his victims.

October is Black History Month, which, amongst other things,

offers the chance to celebrate the way black people have shaped

our capital's culture.

In north London there is a small but very special shop that started

life as the UK's first black publishing house.

It is now celebrating its 50th anniversary.

It sits just across the road from the Piri Piri Chicken

and next door to the dry cleaners.

You would walk past it without noticing it.

But here, in Finsbury Park, the tiny book shop

is of huge significance.

New Beacon Books has since 1966 quietly gone about this business

of pushing black culture into the mainstream.

Not only was it the first black publishing house and book-sellers,

in this country but it started at a time when there was a very real

need for what it did.

If you look at the first few books we published,

they were political, radical in the sense

that they were coming from a Caribbean anaesthetic.

It was quite simply an oasis in a dessert of knowledge

about black history and culture.

New Beacon was the brainchild of this man, a poet,

trade unionist and activist.

It published and sold books written from black communities all over

the world ever since.

John's partner, Sarah White, started the shop with him

and still runs at now.

It started in our bed sitting room.

We had a book service, would you say.

You wouldn't call it a book shop, it was a row of books on a shelf

in our bare living room.

We gradually built up a collection of books of black interest

and we used to take them around.

We had a motorbike and we used to take them around on the motorbike.

We didn't get a shop front or anything like that

for a long time.

By 1973, they had managed to buy the property they are still

in and open a proper shop.

It meant for the first time Londoners could browse and buy books

that they otherwise might never have got the chance to read.

It wasn't fashionable to carry books by black writers.

The idea of going into book shop and being readily able to pick up

books about the Caribbean or written by black authors was not an easy

thing to do.

So this book shop, this publishing house, filled a massive gap

where that was concerned.

The book shop also houses the George Padmore Institute,

founded by John 25 years ago.

It is an archive storing material that tells of the experience

of Afro-Caribbean in Britain and Europe.

The documents they hold often relate to radical change and include

groups like the once vilified Black Panthers.

New Beacon worked closely with the Panthers selling

books at meetings.

I was a Black Panther.

And it was actually in the Black Panthers

where I discovered black literature and my interest developed

and I founded New Beacon.

It played a significant part in my life because not only did

I discover a whole new range of books about Africa,

history, slavery, I discovered a lot of poetry from Africa

and the Caribbean, you know.

It opened up a whole new world for me.

Linton Crazy Johnson's ground-breaking Reggie poetry

was hugely popular and gives us a greater insight into the black

politics of the time, thus creating a greater togetherness

and he reckons that is exactly what this tiny book

shop was all about.

Integration.

We, the newcomers, adopt and adjust themselves to the way

of life of the country.

And the people that were over here already get to find out about us.

New Beacon played a significant part in others getting

to find out about us.

The book shop was able to take that idea of integration even further

by taking its books into schools and libraries for the first time.

Our children were not being given access to anything

about their own lives or their own history.

One of the things that we did, that New Beacon did,

was to make books available to libraries and to make books

available particularly to teaching centres,

professional development centres for teachers.

We were getting quite a lot of orders from libraries.

When libraries starting buying it was in the 80s,

this is part of a Government response to the riots.

It was an attempt to create a new middle-class.

So you suddenly have actually government money,

so the libraries have a pot of money to buy Afro-Caribbean collections.

I do not believe that multicultural education as it came to be known

would have been possible but for the work that this book shop

and others later like it actually did.

But it also did something else.

It encourage young people, British-born, to write.

It encouraged them to see themselves as capable of becoming authors.

So from a very modest beginning of a few books in a bedroom,

we get inspiration, integration and education.

Not bad things to be remembered for after 50 years

and still very quietly going about its business.

New Beacon Books, what an amazing little place.

That's it for this week's Inside Out.

Don't forget if you have missed any of the show you can catch up

on the iPlayer or head to our website.

Thanks for watching.

See you next time.