Transport for London has been accused of “lying” to smear a group of vigilantes seen cleaning graffiti from Tube carriages.
Andy Lord, the transport body’s commissioner, is facing mounting calls to apologise after claiming that individuals were deliberately spraying paint on the London Underground so they could erase it afterwards.
In July, Mr Lord told City Hall that he had “evidence of people creating graffiti and then removing it”, which he suggested was being investigated by the relevant authorities.
Following a Freedom of Information request for evidence held relating to Mr Lord’s statement, TfL confirmed it did “not hold any recorded information”.
Emails reportedly show press officers for TfL asking colleagues if “(we have) any evidence of this at all?”.
One correspondence from a member of staff read: “Rather than give this story more oxygen, we propose the following line that doesn’t explicitly call them out but does implicitly say we don’t think their products could do it.”
LFG cleaned graffiti off the tube.
— Looking for Growth (@lfg_uk) October 23, 2025
TfL smeared us as criminals.
They claimed they had evidence. But we discovered the secret emails that prove they never had evidence.
Lying is bad. Say sorry, Andy. pic.twitter.com/kr0lU1CZ6s
“They made the whole thing up,” volunteer cleaner Joe Reeve, 28, said in a video published on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“They didn’t care about the truth. And they certainly didn’t care about solving the graffiti. They just wanted to cover up their own incompetence.”
Dr Lawrence Newport, who joined Mr Reeve in wiping down graffiti-covered Bakerloo trains over the summer wearing hi-vis jackets emblazoned with the words “Doing What Sadiq Khant”, added: “This is how our political systems react to criticism. They don’t make things better. They lie, they smear and they cover it up.”
Keith Prince, a Reform member of the London Assembly, previously called on Mr Lord to “clarify what he was told”.
But Mr Reeve and Dr Newport, who are co-founders of the campaign group Looking for Growth, have launched a petition urging Mr Lord to issue an apology and join the pair on their next clean-up.
A TfL spokesman said: "The commissioner was making reference to information that he had been made aware of verbally and of work being undertaken within TfL as part of our wider graffiti reduction strategy, which aims to prevent and tackle graffiti vandalism."
