London Conservatives have called for taller ticket barriers at stations and dedicated fare evasion teams to help cut fare dodging.
Almost one in 20 Tube passengers are dodging fares – at a cost of £130m a year – Transport for London (TfL) figures revealed earlier this year.
TfL spent almost £14.2m cracking down on fare dodging across the Tube network and a further £7.7m on the bus network in 2023-2024, collecting £1.3m in penalty charges.
The transport provider said its “data-driven strategy” to tackle the issue was “already making an impact”, reporting fare evasion had dropped to 3.5 per cent from 3.8 per cent in 2023-2024.
But Thomas Turrell, Conservative transport spokesperson at City Hall, told the BBC that TfL’s target to reduce fare dodging to 1.5 per cent by 2030 “isn’t going to happen”.
“Every Londoner has watched someone push through the barriers or jump over them to avoid paying the fare, knowing full well that they will be picking up the cost of the offender’s non-payment in the form of eye-watering fare rises,” Mr Turrell said.
According to Elly Baker, the chair of the transport committee on the London Assembly, there was a recent cross-party report that focused on improving safety through better staffing, but the Conservatives chose not to put suggestions into it.
In May, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick took to the London Underground himself to catch fare dodgers on camera. He said: “It’s annoying watching so many people break the law and get away with it.”
A video posted on social media platform X/Twitter showed him questioning passengers who barged past barriers without paying for a ticket. He was met with verbal abuse and one warning from a man who claimed he was carrying a knife.
To clamp down on fare evasion, TfL drafted in 500 enforcement officers to try to reduce the number of Tube travellers who are not paying.
TfL said in a statement responding to Mr Turrell: “We are strengthening our efforts to detect and deter fare evaders, including expanding our team of professional investigators, 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.”
