EAST Midlands Railway (EMR) bosses stood accused by the RMT union today of “playing fast and loose” with Covid-19 safety over the bank holiday weekend.

Serious overcrowding at London’s St Pancras station and on trains across the franchise’s network were cited by the union as evidence that passenger and staff safety are of little concern to the company, as it “repeated the mistakes” the union said were made in December.

RMT general secretary Mick Lynch said: “Either through incompetence, or a safety culture coming a distant second to the culture of corporate greed, trains across the network are being reported as over capacity, with zero social distancing.”

Despite evidence that the India Covid-19 variant is spreading rapidly and that infection rates in Leicester are a serious concern, Mr Lynch charged that EMR had “not taken a single measure or carried out a single risk assessment” to safeguard passengers or staff.

Mr Lynch cited toilets with hand-washing facilities out of order, short-formed trains with reduced capacity, cancellations due to a refusal to pay overtime to staff who have offered to alleviate the problem, and failure to train staff on new rolling stock.

And he accused EMR’s senior management of “patting themselves on the back for a job well done while leaving the overworked front-line staff to deal with the fallout from their absence of leadership.”

EMR apologised for the “discomfort and inconvenience that some of our customers have experienced over the bank-holiday weekend” and said that train cancellations and engineering on the east coast mainline had made its trains busier than normal.

A spokesperson said that safety was the firm’s biggest priority and insisted that risk assessments had been made, adding: “It’s not possible to guarantee that all customers who wish to travel can socially distance on board.”