Tories say fare evasion levels show Sadiq Khan has “lost control”

Westminster councillor Festus Akinbusoye made the claims reports Kumail Jaffer, Local Democracy Reporter

The entrance to High Barnet Station on the Northern Line — High Barnet Station

City Hall is rewarding Transport for London (TfL) officials who have “lost control” of fare evasion on the network, a senior Conservative campaigner has claimed.

The total cost of fare evasion – which involves everything from smashing through tube barriers to refusing to tap in on buses – is estimated to be £190million every year.

Meanwhile, a TfL report from July revealed that 2,048 staff received more than £100,000 once bonuses and overtime were included – with commissioner Andy Lord taking home £635,533.

Festus Akinbusoye – a Westminster councillor and former police and crime commissioner – has now called on the Mayor of London to stop rewarding “failure” and spend the money on rolling out further enforcement across tubes and buses.

He said: “You have to blame the people who are in charge – it’s an absolute indictment of the fact that someone has actually lost control when you consider that fares have increased by 5.5% in the last year.

“It makes you wonder who’s actually funding the criminal decisions of those people who choose not to pay to use the trains as the rest of us have to. Someone has got to take responsibility for this.

“Taxpayers are subsidizing the criminal choices of those who choose not to pay, and people in City Hall are being rewarded for failure. This is wrong.

“You have to incentivise best practice in City Hall. You cannot be giving a bonus to people who are failing.

“There is no way that the commissioner for TfL should be getting any bonus whatsoever at all at a time where fare evasion is rising.

“We need to put the right level of incentive in place for those who are responsible for this. The £165 million that has been lost to evasion [on the Tube and Elizabeth Line] could actually recruit about 2,000 enforcement and revenue inspection officers on TfL.

“That is a phenomenal number of people that we can actually use to get the money back.

“If you’re playing by the rules and you’re paying, you should have the Mayor supporting you, not going against you.”

Last month Conservative assembly member Neil Garratt released analysis revealing that that since 2020, successful prosecutions for those who fail to pay the fine for fare evasion have declined from 29,113 cases to just 14,406.

He also revealed that there are the same number of enforcement officers on the network now – 500 – as there were in 2010.

Separately, analysis by the Centre for Government Reform suggests that fare evasion on London Underground and Elizabeth line almost matches the extra revenue from price hikes imposed in March.

“Enforcement has halved in the last year, whereas evasion has doubled,” Akinbusoye added.

“Clearly, something is not right here when you consider the fact that about £165 million, according to some of the data we’ve seen recently, is what has been lost through fare evasion, and £168 million is what has been received through fare increases effectively.”

It is estimated that 3.5 per cent of the 3.6 billion annual passenger journeys across the TfL network go unpaid – the equivalent of 126 million free journeys every year, or 2.4 million every week. TfL now say the figure is down to 3.3 per cent.

TfL has a long-term target to reduce system-wide fare evasion to 1.5% or less by the 2030/31 financial year.

The mayor has praised the network’s efforts in recent years, and noted that evasion in other major global cities like New York and Paris is higher.

But Akinbusoye said: “How many people in London do you think care about that? Londoners are faced with a cost-of-living crisis.

“They’ve seen their fares go up. They do not care about New York. And quite frankly, I just want to make sure that here in London, the Mayor of London does not increase fares anymore until his office, finds a way to reduce the level of fare evasion, because we are literally subsidising criminal activity on our network.”

Last year the City Hall Conservatives unveiled a 10-point plan to tackle fare evasion, which included measures like higher barriers, AI-enabled ticket barriers and a city-wide awareness campaign promoting civic responsibility.

The report, from Tory assembly member Thomas Turrell, recommended barriers be installed at every single entrance point across the network, and eventually replace the current models taller ones that make it harder to jump over, crawl under, or push through them.

Akinbusoye said any delays caused by the taller, New York-style barriers compared to London’s “through flow” system is “very, very worth the money we’re going to save from it.”

“This is about a collapse in the social contract that we have in London, where law-abiding citizens see every day people pushing through the barriers,” he added.

“It just tells them nobody cares about the social contract anymore, and we need to find a way to bring this back and give people confidence in our system in London.”

A TfL spokesperson told the LDRS: “By focusing our enforcement teams on locations with a high prevalence of people pushing through gates and using the latest technology to target the most prolific fare evaders across the network, the pan-TfL fare evasion rate has dropped to 3.3 per cent from down from 3.9 per cent in 2022/23.

“This builds on the work of our team of more than 500 uniformed officers already deployed across the network to deal with fare evasion and other anti-social behaviour, keeping staff and customers safe.

“By increasing enforcement activity to tackle fare evasion, last financial year we issued over 69,000 penalty fares and reported over 21,000 individuals for possible prosecution. We are committed to reducing the current rate of fare evasion to 1.5 per cent by 2030/31 financial year and the strategy we now have in place will help us ensure more persistent evaders face justice.”

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