I hope the whole issue of cutting Network Rail Maintenance and Ops staff doesn't get lost in the headline "it's about pay" message. There's some really worrying things proposed for Maintenance, I remember Phase 2b/c being bad but this is a whole league on from that. The difficulty is that bean-counters (including HMT?) do not understand the cost of reliability. Nor is the lack of staff in the signalling grade (vacancy level) helping.
I recall that in one particular part of Network Rail maintenance that I dealt with a few years ago, there was a cycle: reliability of S&T equipment would deteriorate, delay minutes stack up and be costly. So, more staff would be got and put on preventative maintenance. Lo and behold, over 6 months or so the reliability would improve until the delay minutes were minimal. About 6 months after that, the bean-counters would demand getting rid of a bunch of S&T preventative maintenance staff because the delay minutes were down so obviously they were not needed any more..........
The concept that in preventative maintenance, your goal is "nothing" (no failures, no delay minutes) so your success is measured in being at "nothing" seemed totally beyond their comprehension.
The whole idea of "remote monitoring" as a staff cost-cutter has been kicking around for over a decade now. It suffers from some practical flaws: (1) You still need staff to attend the pending failure before the item fails; (2) the technology is simple on one level- the comms and sensors. But the challenge is what the sensors measure- what is the "about to fail" signal in the equipment? How long do you get after the signal starts before it fails? What is the lead-time of the possibly-obsolete part to fix the kit? And with a variety of equipment, you need to establish that for all the different types of kit. This is currently in the heads of skilled staff who over time build up this knowledge, but replacing the slowly-built "local knowledge" in the heads of staff isn't that simple. Then you have to somehow manage the big data output and convert it into a work regime.... and do all this whilst running trains. To (slightly mis)quote Ben Goldacre, "I think you'll find it's not as simple as you thought."
[I am sure there is room for cuts in Network Rail, but as I've said, not in Ops or Maintenance front-line staff and their local management/support. Possible economies might be from looking at the Projects regimes (the big projects don't seem able to understand/manage costs compared to other utilities) and also the amount of double-staffing in areas like Track Renewals (where too often there is a NR person as well as a contractor person doing the same thing where one would do). Similarly, integrating TOCs more could/should reduce senior management without a deleterious impact on the front line- how many TOC MDs are really required when DfT is running the show for example?]