Conservative campaigner Festus Akinbusoye has accused City Hall of rewarding Transport for London (TfL) officials who have “lost control” of fare evasion on the network. The total cost of fare evasion, including smashing through tube barriers and refusing to tap in on buses, is estimated at £190 million every year.
High Salaries and Bonuses Under Fire
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. Akinbusoye, a Westminster City Councillor and former Police and Crime Commissioner, has called on the Mayor of London to stop rewarding “failure” and instead 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 per cent 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.”
Call for Incentives and More Officers
Akinbusoye argued: “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.”
He highlighted that the £165 million lost to evasion on the Tube and Elizabeth Line could 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.”
Declining Prosecutions and Enforcement
Last month, Conservative Assembly Member Neil Garratt released analysis showing that since 2020, successful prosecutions for failing to pay fare evasion fines have declined from 29,113 cases to just 14,406. The number of enforcement officers on the network remains at 500, the same as in 2010.
Separate 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. Akinbusoye added: “Enforcement has halved in the last year, whereas evasion has doubled. 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.”
Evasion Rates and Targets
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 says 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, noting that evasion in other 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.”
Proposed Solutions and TfL Response
Last year, City Hall Conservatives unveiled a 10-point plan to tackle fare evasion, including higher barriers, AI-enabled ticket barriers, and a city-wide awareness campaign. The report, from Tory Assembly Member Thomas Turrell, recommended barriers at every entrance point, eventually replacing current models with taller ones that are harder to jump over, crawl under, or push through.
Akinbusoye said any delays caused by 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.” He added: “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. 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.”
