Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, will announce a £3m investment for 100 extra police officers on the night tube to reassure passengers and communities as the capital prepares for the launch of 24-hour underground travel next weekend.
While many in London eagerly await all-night trains, which businesses expect to give an immediate boost to bars and the entertainment sector, an internal risk assessment leaked this year suggested that Transport for London was anticipating higher levels of rowdy behaviour and assaults. London Underground bosses said the public should feel confident in the safety and security of the night tube, and said they would be monitoring the service closely.
The phased move into 24-hour operation will start with trains running all night on Fridays and Saturdays on the Central line, the tube’s main east-west artery, and the Victoria line, which runs from Brixton to Walthamstow Central. With trains roughly every 10 minutes through the night, TfL said nocturnal journeys would be 20 minutes quicker on average, with many passengers saving more than an hour.
A test run took place over the weekend, with trains in service on the lines, but not carrying passengers.
Khan said the night tube would bring great economic benefits for the capital and reinforce his message to the world, following the EU referendum, that London remains open. “What better way to illustrate that than the tube running 24 hours a day,” he said.
The service would allow many more people to experience the city’s culture, nightlife, theatres and music venues, Khan said.
“Over the last eight years we have lost, as a city, 50% of our clubs and 40% of our live music venues, and for the greatest city in the world, that’s not sustainable,” said Khan, suggesting that the night tube could help reverse this trend, while stating his intention to use planning laws to protect live venues and “preserve the heritage”.
“I’m also aware that thousands of Londoners work 24 hours a day: many doctors, porters or security guards take two or three night buses to get home,” he said.
In a reference to the delays in launching the night tube under his predecessor, Boris Johnson, Khan said: “I’m aware that the previous mayor set a date and broke his promise three times. By the end, he said we’d survived 150 years without one and could do without it. He’s wrong.”
The service’s gestation has been fraught, with its launch delayed by almost a year. In what quickly came to be seen as a mistake, the night tube plan was unveiled by Johnson and transport chiefs, while burying accompanying “modernisation” plans to cut jobs and close ticket offices. Any union goodwill over rosters and work-life balance quickly evaporated, and an agreed date to launch the night tube was only reached after Johnson’s exit from City Hall.
Finn Brennan, the Aslef union’s organiser for tube drivers, said: “Having the new mayor in place who was clear about wanting to work with staff and unions certainly changed the atmosphere.”
Despite the progress, no date has been set for the three major other lines planned to follow in the autumn. Khan said: “The reason why I’m phasing them in is I’m keen to make sure that we don’t have noise pollution, and that the buses are working in parallel and there are enough police. What’s important is that we get the right processes in place.”
He admitted that there were already some problems on late-night weekend services, with more than 500,000 passengers using the tube after 10pm. “Obviously with more people using public transport, there’s a legitimate concern over making sure we’ve got enough police,” Khan said.
Noise from trains is an issue for residents, particularly those living along the outer reaches of the Central line. The mayor said there had been “a huge amount of preparatory works to ameliorate disturbance,” including upgrading tracks with shock-absorbent fixings to help deaden the sound. Station announcements will also be minimised.
Despite the pitfalls and expenditure, with 500 additional staff having been recruited and revenue not expected to cover costs for many years, the economic prize, according to research by business group London First and services company EY, is high. It found that the capital’s night-time economy already supports about one in eight (723,000) jobs and could be worth nearly £30bn a year by 2030.
But transport authorities are hoping, paradoxically, that the measure of success for the launch of the night tube is that passengers do not notice it. “It should be seamless,” said Mark Wild, the managing director of London Underground.
While there may be a touch of internal fanfare on the first service, as it pulls out of Brixton station on Friday night, commuters should not see any difference from day to night, with staff working as normal on the platforms. Usual off-peak fares will apply, and journeys starting before 4.30am will be counted as part of the previous day, meaning that many passengers could in effect travel free at night if they have already reached Oyster or contactless card daily caps.
The missing five hours from the last train to the first are not a time when the tube sleeps, even now. Wild was speaking from the control room at TfL’s Southwark HQ, which is staffed through the night, watching as maintenance trains run on the tracks, monitoring intersections of the tube and other rail networks, and ensuring that all those who go in come out.
From here, on a bank of screens on the wall, every train’s whereabouts can be monitored and every underground platform in central London clearly viewed via CCTV cameras. Police sit alongside and information is rapidly transmitted to anyone who could be affected by an incident or delay. The man at the hot desk is, one operations manager said, the “single voice of truth” for information screens, news, phone apps and anyone following London transport.
“We’ve already got eyes on the whole network and full control here, 24/7,” said Wild. A returning Briton, Wild ran the transport system in Melbourne and helped introduce weekend night services on the city’s tram and train network earlier this year.
While the size of the network and the passenger numbers are a fraction of London’s, Wild said the move was transformative for the city and expected a similarly swift take-up of the service in London. TfL is confident of pent-up demand: the number of passengers travelling on the tube after 10pm on Friday and Saturday nights has gone up by 70% in the past 15 years.
Even before the additional police were confirmed, Wild said the public should feel very safe and confident using the service. “People should feel as comfortable using this at night during the day. I expect it all to be pretty normal,” he said.
Without the deadline of the last tube, Wild said, demand should be smoother and the rush avoided, while he played down the possibility of late-night passengers continuing drunken revelling in transit. “Everyone knows the rules. Coming here from different jurisdictions, people here are very well behaved. They should feel safe and secure,” he said.
