Passengers on Southern Railway face more travel chaos after the drivers' union decided to launch a fresh ban on overtime.

Members of Aslef will refuse to work overtime from the end of the month after the breakdown of talks aimed at resolving a year-long dispute over staffing and driver-only trains.

The action is expected to cause more disruption to Southern's services, which have been hit by cancellations and delays for over a year because of industrial action, staff shortages and other problems.

Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union on Southern are going on strike on May 30 as part of their long-running row with the company over the same issue.

Nick Brown, chief operating officer at Southern’s parent company Govia Thameslink Railway, said: “After over five months of intense negotiations and two peace deals agreed and recommended by the ASLEF executive, we are dismayed the union leadership is taking this action, which is designed to impact as many of our passengers as possible.

“Driver-controlled operation with on-board supervisors was fully implemented back in January and thanks to this we are running more trains than before and our service has improved for five consecutive months. We’re safely running over 80,000 trains a month with drivers controlling the doors across our network – we’re sorry that passengers will suffer as a result of this unnecessary action.

“We have worked our hardest to resolve this dispute with ASLEF. If this action does go ahead we will run as full a timetable as possible. We will be working around the clock to evaluate the impact and develop contingency plans which will be advertised as soon as possible.”