Closures and absences under Khan drive standards down the Tube
Mayor accused of point scoring and vanity projects rather than getting down to basics of running trains
“DYSFUNCTIONAL” Tube staff are closing stations throughout the day thousands of times a year, inflicting chaos on passengers, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose.
Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, has been accused of “losing the plot” and subjecting the travelling public to “meltdown” over the closures, with MPs demanding that he overhaul staff productivity.
The Telegraph has found that London Underground stations were closed 2,115 times during operating hours last year, excluding any industrial action or preplanned closures, with some stations shuttered once every four days and most closed for hours at a time.
This is a 20 per cent jump on the figure 2021 and more than three times the amount that shut before the pandemic, despite Transport for London (TfL) increasing fares by six per cent last month. It also eclipses the peak of 679 stations closed because of Covid-19.
The closures were all cases where a station shut suddenly, without warning or planning, with passengers unable to enter or exit and trains unable to stop so people cannot interchange to other lines. While TfL announces line closures, it does not reveal short-notice station closures, meaning passengers are caught by surprise while en route and must hastily rearrange their travel plans, often involving long detours to other stations.
In the worst hotspot, Chancery Lane station on the Central line at the heart of London’s business and legal chambers district, was closed 337 times between 2019 and 2022 – once every four days, all but seven of which were last year.
Goodge Street and Tufnell Park, both Northern line stations, were next worst at 224 and 227 closures respectively.
Almost 80 per cent of the closures last year were for “customer service” reasons, which mostly consists of “temporary unavailability of staff ”, TfL said, followed by “systems and infrastructure” where lifts, escalators or power is faulty, with far less common reasons including evacuations, customer incidents and train faults.
The rate of TfL staff off sick last year was 6.8 per cent, up from 4.3 per cent in 2016 and triple the national average.
Mr Khan offers TfL employees, as well as a reported 54,000 of their friends and family, free travel passes. Workers also receive gold-plated pensions where the taxpayer pays in 27 per cent employer contributions.
It has also thrown into doubt TfL’s strict rules that all stations must be manned – and closed if they are not. The taxpayer body employs more than 4,500 station staff and the hard-Left Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union has inflicted repeated highly disruptive strikes on Londoners over proposals to not recruit into 600 posts when they become vacant. The most lengthy yearly closure for “customer service” reasons was 23 hours at Chancery Lane in July last year during Night Tube, 19 hours at Tufnell Park in December 2021 at rush hour, nine hours at Kensal Green in August 2020 at 2pm, and 13 hours at Chancery Lane at 7am in November 2019.
Sir John Hayes, a former transport minister and chairman of the Common Sense Group of Tory MPs, likened Mr Khan’s running of TfL to that of Nero, the Roman emperor notorious for his disinterest in ruling.
He said: “He is fiddling while for the rest of Londoners, we see a burning problem not being able to get around because either roads are clogged up due to his ludicrous road charging and other policies, or Tube stations are closed so people can’t get home, go to work or carry out caring responsibilities.
“It has a dramatic effect and we’re fed up with a Mayor who is fiddling while leaving a trail of destruction.”
Sir Bob Neill, the Tory MP for Bromley and Chislehurst, told The Telegraph: “It just shows the complete meltdown and dysfunction where the Mayor is more interested in political point-scoring over Ulez and other things rather than getting the basics right and running the transport service properly.”
Of the top 10 worst stations, three were on the Central line, four on the Northern line, two on the Circle and District lines and one on the Jubilee line. Even the newest stations of Nine
Elms and Battersea Power Station on the Northern line, which opened in autumn 2021 and were called a “vanity project” by critics, have been closed almost 40 times in just over a year.
TfL was given just under £1.2 billion more grant funding in August last year and has had £6billion since March 2020. But Mr Khan, who has been in charge of the body since 2016, accused ministers of “still leaving TfL with a significant funding gap” and “levelling down London” and blaming Covid as “the sole cause of TfL’s financial crisis”.
Nick Rogers AM, the Tory transport spokesman, said: “Sadiq Khan’s mismanagement of TfL has caused chaos for commuters. This is the Mayor who broke the balance sheet at TfL before the pandemic, allowed militant unions to run riot, and splashed a fresh coat of paint on existing bus routes so he could pretend they were new. Londoners deserve much better than this.”
A TfL spokesman said: “We apologise to any customers whose journeys have been affected by station closures ... We are aware of the disruption that station closures can cause and only close them as a last resort.”
A spokesman for the Mayor of London said: “TfL workers have gone above and beyond to keep London moving in extremely challenging circumstances throughout the pandemic and the protracted uncertainty regarding the Government’s funding deal that followed.”
A Department for Transport spokesman said that “we expect the Mayor and TfL to deliver reliable services and act in the best interest of passengers”.