TfL needs a bailout, but nobody should give the Mayor a blank cheque
As Londoners start to look forward to the end of the lockdown, TfL is in need of a bailout. Otherwise, according to Sadiq Khan, it will run out of cash.
On the face of it, there’s nothing remarkable about TfL needing a bailout. Tube ridership is down 94%, buses down 85%. Even if passenger numbers were to bounce back between now and Christmas, TfL could be looking at a £2bn hole in its finances.
Read more: Think-tank says TfL fares should go up
There seems little doubt the government will provide a lifeline. But this is not a Mayor to whom they should give a blank cheque. I should know — I spent 6 years on the board of TfL under both Boris and Sadiq.
This is the Mayor whose flagship fare freeze policy – which barely helped Londoners because didn’t cover travelcards – cost TfL £640m. Even before Covid-19, out of 26 major TfL projects, 17 were delayed by a year or more, four had been paused or cancelled, and only four were on track.
This is the Mayor who presided over the Crossrail fiasco. One of his first acts was to remove the only person on the Crossrail board who also sat on the TfL board. For two crucial years, between 2016 and 2018, the TfL board was fed good news by management about how the project was on track. The truth? A four-year delay and a £2.8 billion cost over-run.
This is the Mayor who doubled City Hall staff costs to £66m and increased his office’s PR spend by 26%. This is the Mayor who in February bunged London bus drivers £32m to stop them striking over fatigue and lack of toilets during his re-election campaign.
Has the Mayor been doing any better during the Covid-19 crisis?
As late as mid-March, the only mention of Covid-19 in papers for an upcoming TfL board meeting was a 32-word paragraph on page 40. Just days later, after warning of Covid-19’s impact on its finances, TfL closed 40 Tube stations. There was no indication at the time that staff sickness was the problem; it seems to have been about the money. People were crammed into stations and trains, despite the fact that there had already been dozens of deaths in London.
Then London transport workers started to die – 34 of them by the end of April, including 28 bus workers. Did Sadiq give them PPE? No, he cooked up a deal with Unite to close off the front doors of buses, but steadfastly denies PPE is needed. At the same time, he started calling on the government to make the public wear face coverings. It makes no sense: either masks work or they don’t. You watch – he’ll give London’s heroic transport workers PPE as soon as his union paymasters tell him to.
So, yes, there absolutely needs to be a bailout for TfL. But it must only be used to scale up safe transport services after the lockdown, not to paper over past financial incompetence; and Sadiq has to step up, stop criticising everybody else, and provide the leadership that right now London so desperately needs.