How a £1.50 bus fare turned into a £750 fine

WhEN my friend robert rowland left his house to catch the Number 9 bus to work, he had no idea he was about to enter a Kafkaesque nightmare which would land him a criminal conviction and a fine of more than £750.

As he boarded the shiny new routemaster in West london he realised he had forgotten to pick up his wallet, containing his credit cards and his office security pass.

robert, who works in finance, usually pays the £1.50 fare with his contactless American Express card. he explained his predicament to the driver and offered to pay cash.

the driver said he wasn’t allowed to take money, but recognised robert as one of his regular passengers and said he could stay on the bus and have a word with the conductor, who also told him not to worry. Both of them accepted that he wasn’t deliberately attempting to avoid paying the fare.

robert went upstairs and took his seat. Somewhere along the route between his home and his office in Green Park, near the ritz hotel, an inspector got on.

this is where it all began to unravel. When robert couldn’t produce a ticket, or a valid lobster Card, the inspector turned nasty and accused him of deliberate fare dodging.

robert again explained that he’d left his wallet at home, insisted he was not trying to evade the fare and said he was happy to pay cash. the inspector wasn’t having any of it.

he ordered the bus to stop, even though it was packed with commuters on their way to work, and demanded to know robert’s name and address, which he managed somehow to verify by making a call on his mobile phone.

Did you know that london bus inspectors have instant access to a computerised database containing personal information about their passengers — and presumably everyone in Britain? Me neither. But that’s just one sinister aspect of this sorry story.

this inspector was the jobsworth from central casting, a cross between Blakey from on the Buses and a member of the Waffen SS. he is living proof of my oft-repeated dictum that whenever you give anyone any modicum of authority, especially if it comes with a uniform, they will always, always, abuse it.

DESPItE robert’s protestations of innocence, Blakey handed him a penalty notice. Burning with a sense of injustice, robert wrote to transport for london laying out the evidence and insisting that he never had any intention of avoiding payment. his plea for leniency was rejected and he was ordered to pay a fine of £225.

that’s right, his £1.50 fare, which he had offered to pay three times, had turned into a ridiculously harsh fine out of all proportion to the sum involved and the alleged ‘offence’. But wait, it gets worse.

At this stage, robert was ready to admit defeat, figuring he’d pay the £225 just to make it go away. But when he wrote back, he received a reply wanting to know details of his income, his investments, the value of his home and his outgoings. All this over a 30-bob bus fare? Being a law-abiding sort, robert complied with the request. More fool him. I’d have told them to stick it up the exhaust pipe of one of their double-deckers.

Next thing he knew, he’d received a letter from lavender hill Magistrates telling him that his case had been heard in his absence and ordering him to pay a grand total of £756.50 — made up of a £500 fine, the original £1.50 fare, costs of £225 and a victim support surcharge of £30.

the court said that if he failed to pay within 14 days, a warrant would be issued for his arrest, the fine would increase by a further 50 per cent and additional costs would be incurred.

After that, either his employer would be instructed to deduct the money from his salary; it would be taken direct from his bank account; his goods and chattels to the value of £756.50 would be seized; or his car would be clamped, removed and sold. Whatever happened to the punishment fitting the ‘crime’?

I am not making any of this up. robert has given me the paperwork to prove it. he’s appealing against his conviction and sentence, but doesn’t hold out much hope.

What kind of country has Britain become when a respectable 50-year-old father-of-four can get a criminal record and be punished severely for an honest mistake, even though it is obvious to anyone with half a brain cell that he hadn’t tried to evade his fare.

robert can produce his Amex statement showing previous payments of £1.50 to london Buses. he only stayed on board because he was invited to do so by the driver and conductor, patently decent chaps who sympathised with him.

otherwise, he’d have got off and either gone home to collect his wallet or taken a taxi to work.

there was no problem until this ghastly jumped-up jobsworth of an inspector decided to start throwing his weight around.

you know the type. In another lifetime, he’s the kind of officious little functionary who would have been loading the cattle trucks to the concentration camps.

RoBErt’S ordeal is a parable of our times. I’d love to say I’m surprised, but frankly I’m not. how often have I written about our draconian, modern punishment culture? Public servants no longer exist to serve the public. Whether it’s the old Bill trashing the homes and reputations of innocent journalists and blameless celebrities such as Cliff richard, or councils fining people for accidentally putting their recycling in the wrong container, their main purpose in life is to make decent citizens into criminals, to screw as much money out of us as possible and show us who’s boss.

Justice at every level has been turned on its head. We are all now considered to be guilty of something unless we can prove ourselves innocent. In most cases, the process is part of the punishment.

And in the case of robert rowland, even though he can prove himself innocent and has witnesses to support his story, he’s assumed to be guilty anyway and will have to pay through the nose for the privilege of being treated as a common thief.

Makes you proud to be British.

A SECURITY review commissioned by London Mayor Sadiq Khan concluded that open borders significantly increase the risk of Paris-style terror attacks here. Yet Khan wants Britain to stay in the EU, complete with freedom of movement for anyone who manages to set foot in Europe. Scandalously, he’s putting political posturing before the safety of the people he’s paid to protect.