Flick Drummond has called on the RMT union and Southern Rail management to keep talking to resolve the dispute which threatens to cause travel chaos for commuters.
Flick said: "This strike is unfortunate because it’s affecting commuters who already have to put up with a poor quality of service on routes around Portsmouth even though the source of the dispute is about trains running from London to Gatwick.
The changes that Southern are proposing on staffing are not new to the railways and are used on about a third of all trains running in the UK over the last thirty years without any safety concerns. I hope both sides will be prepared to talk to resolve an issue that means very little to the people of Portsmouth who are just in the firing line of strike action and years of poor service."
Flick hopes that Southern will also look at what they can do to provide better value for commuters, saying "Southern are running trains out of Portsmouth which do not have toilets on board, and that is simply not acceptable in 2016."