TfL hikes fines for Tube and bus fare dodging
TFL has increased its penalty fare in an effort to put people off dodging paying for travel.
As of March 3, the fine is £100 – an increase of £20 from the previous £80 charge.
This is reduced to £50 if it is paid within 21 days. It comes after National Rail fares were increased by 4.9 per cent on Sunday (Monday, March 3).
Single pay-as-you-go TfL fares on the Tube, Elizabeth line, Overground, buses and more, meanwhile have remained the same after the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, assigned £123 million in the Greater London Authority’s (GLA) budget. But price caps have risen in line with nationwide rail fares, meaning frequent travellers could still be charged more.
During 2023, TfL says it prosecuted 19,614 people for fare evasion, also known as ‘bumping’ – an increase of 56 percent on 2022. The authority also investigated 421 people for ‘habitual’ fare evasion, who made more than 50,000 irregular journeys across the Underground network.
The crime is estimated to cost TfL between £130 and £150 million a year. Its most recent annual estimate of fare evasion (2022-23) across all of its public transport modes is 3.9 per cent.
Some of this lost income is recovered through revenueenforcement activity, amounting to £7.2 million in 2022-23 in penalty fare and prosecution income. Penalty fare income is used to help offset the costs of enforcement but does not come close to covering these in full.
Last month, TfL enforcement officer Asif Shaikh, 40, told MyLondon the most common excuses people came up with when caught trying to avoid a travel fee: ■Forgotten their freedom pass; ■Lost their Oyster on the way; ■Their phone battery died on the way, meaning they cannot pay using contactless; ■The gates were ‘already open’ at the station they started from, so they did not tap in. Younger customers, he added, are often given money by their parents for travel, but they “tend to spend it on chicken or chips” instead.