Sadiq Khan should be shamed on this and other failings with public transport in London. I think the press are the ones to complain to. I would say email our London Assembly members, but they never reply to anything. You’re lucky to get a read receipt.
Contact the BBC and the press. There isn’t time to do anything else but kick off.
Sadiq Khan has nothing to do with Southern trains.
What other failings do you mean? Every other transport company except TFL had been bailed out (yesterday a plan was agreed I know) despite the fact they carry more passengers per year than every other transport company combined.
He’s elected to represent us Londoners.
The Mayor has a duty to set out plans and policies for London covering transport, planning and development, housing, economic development and regeneration, culture health inequalities and a range of environmental issues including climate change and air quality.
That duty should include a duty of care for our safety. Whether or not that transport comes under TFL ownership or whoever owns it.
TFL receives enormous amounts of public money, far more than public transport in other parts off the country. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about his duty of care both to the citizens of London and to the public transport workers whose lives are also put at risk.
It doesn’t actually- it’s operating capital comes 2/3 from fares and borrowing. The grants it receives are ring fenced for projects such as crossrail and the northern line extension.
Southern is a private company- the Mayor cannot force it to anything it doesn’t want to. TFL tendered to operate all the trains on our route and were blocked from doing so.
Put blame were it’s due- in this case on Southern.
So TfL is not using public money … by virtue of it borrowing money?
Who do you think is going to have to repay that money?
It’s not a zero-sum game. Infrastructure investment allows more people to move more easily and facilitates more economic activity overall. How is this different from investment in road maintenance and building? That’s paid for by public money too…
Mary’s point still stands - TfL gets a large amount of public funding.
Let’s not go off topic by debating the value/ethics of borrowing money for infra projects.
This is veering off topic you are right.
My key point was mainly that TFL/the mayor can’t force Southern to run more services, much as I wish they could.
TfL can do nothing about Southern and the way they run their services. As people have said Govia are a private company whose franchise is awarded and overseen by the DfT.
TfL have talked about taking over suburban rail services in London to allow them more control over service standards
So yesterday’s £1.6 billion bailout isn’t public money?
Maybe we need a split thread as Sadiq Khan has no influence and nothing to do with the safe transit of Londoners, whoever supplies the means of transport. At least he’s stopped saying “my Dad was a bus driver”. I’ve always thought the GLA a waste of money anyway.
This chart illustrates the huge amount of public money going into transport in London, compared with other parts of the country.
Source of that chart and further info downloadable here:
Done. Please feel free to update the topic’s title if needed.
Please all note that for the moment I’ve left this in #local-services rather than move to #local-politics 
Is any of that going to Southern Rail?
I think yesterday’s bailout was just to TFL. But I’m not sure.
Two different points. Every other transport company has already been bailed out unconditionally. TFL finally has but 500m is a loan. Despite tfl carrying more passengers than every other company combined
So Southern Rail has been bailed out by tax payers’ money then? In addition to TFL being similarly bailed out?
As ever things are quite complicated.
TfL are a local government body responsible for Transport in London - buses, some roads (red routes), DLR, Underground, trams and a limited number of overground services (eg Overground, TfL Rail). The Mayor and GLA have control over those.
However a lot of mainline stations and overland track is owned by another public body - Network Rail which the Mayor and GLA have no control over - which for example is why the Overground 24 service does not come further than New Cross as it runs on London Underground lines until then and Network Rail lines after that.
Finally a lot of London, especially SE London, is serviced by overground trains running in to mainline stations. These are run by private train operating companies (TOCs) whose franchises are awarded and monitored by the Department of Transport. Again the Mayor and GLA have no control over those.
In terms of “bailouts” I understand that yesterdays £1.6 bn was just for TfL.
In terms of the TOCs franchises have already been suspended which essentially means government is covering their operating costs now.
I’ve emailed Sadiq Khan London metro southern rail and Grant Shapps
I think we all have to kick up a stink about this.
Now more than ever we need efficient transport to prevent overcrowding and potential spread of Covid.
Might be worth adding Ellie Reeves to the list. Of all the London and other local politicians I wrote to about another issue, she was the only one who did anything. She didn’t get anywhere, but at least she tried.
Our London Assembly members didn’t even reply.
i’ll do that Monday.
I’m so depressed by this I can’t even think about it any more especially as its looking like in a few weeks we’ll be back to pre-pandemic traveller levels.
I doubt that. It’s 9% at the moment. I, in common with a lot of office workers have been told our offices are not reopening any time soon. I continue to work from home full time.
You’re lucky…Myself and many people I know have been told to prepare to return 1st week in June, in fact 3/4 of my team have been in for the last week
Fare paying passengers, as ordered by the government. Or so the theory went until March 2020…
Not quite. They’re just running a service for a fee. A bit like a cleaning contractor…
Yes I am lucky, pretty much my entire workplace can work from home. Can your job only be done at work? I am at a loss to understand why any employer would recall staff at the moment if they can work from home.
no sadly not-without going into details there is only so much we can do from home.
There is only me and one other lady who are still at home.
In both our cases we know our workplace has put into action great safeguards as regards the safety of the staff IN work but neither of us can get our heads round using the underground and in my case overground too.
Nor can I to be honest so I feel for you. Is cycling an option?
Are you able to drive in? I realize the congestion charge is coming back, and at a higher rate from June 22nd, but maybe Khan could be convinced to extend the rebate scheme to all key workers, not just NHS staff. Even if you’re not classed as a key worker and don’t have a car that might free up some capacity to make public transport less crowded.
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Since the lockdown, all of the remaining TOCs are nationalised in all but name. Two are directly owned by the DfT, Northern and LNER run by the Operator of Last Resort.
Thank you, rbmartin. v useful to know
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No sadly I dont drive-The congestion charge returned today and some of my colleagues
who drive have just swallowed and paid it.
I’m unable to cycle so I’m just intending to wrap my face in a scarf, wear gloves and keep my fingers crossed on the train and tube.
I’m sorry you and your colleagues are having such worrisome and in some cases expensive journeys. I hope it gets a bit easier for you as people get better organized and space themselves more. And that people take their noses out of their phones and watch where they’re going. Best of luck. Take care.
Thank you!
Its going to be even more expensive as I’ve found out that from next month I can’t use my freedom pass for free travel during rush hour.
Obviously the assumption is most over 60’s dont work!
From what I understand, it’s the morning peak only where the Freedom Pass won’t be valid temporarily.
You’ll still be able to use it after 0930 weekdays and all day weekends and bank holidays.
What’s interesting is that TFL and the Mayor have been saying for weeks the busiest time has come forward. Their website still says:
Our network is at its busiest between the hours of 05:45-08:15
That’s interesting but thinking about it I’m not that surprised. Many key workers and those who can’t work from home tend to start work early. If you’ve ever taken the Jubilee line before 7:30 you will likely have noticed large numbers of construction workers on their way to Central London.
In contrast, I reckon that most of the typical 9-5 folk are either working from home or not at all.
Yes I think you’re right from various news items I’ve seen on TV recently. That’s why I’m curious why TFL need to restrict Freedom pass and 60+ Oyster card holders on TFL services before 9.30. Or it’s just easy to stick with 9.30 as that matches what has always been the case on non TFL services.
It matches the time when the peak fare ends on Oyster/Contactless (which is 0927 to be precise).
Worth noting that Freedom Pass usage in the morning peak has been only on TfL services, such as the Overground from Forest Hill, buses, tubes and DLR. Southern have never allowed Freedom Passes before 0930, even where the trains run alongside Overground services.
My friend heard on LBC that they can’t be used until 9.30 & between 4-7 pm. Is that going to come into force as well? Albeit temporary, that will probably become permanent.
As @maxrocks said over 60s are still working & when my husband goes back to work he will use buses, overground or tube, depending where he is working & will travel about 6 am, so will have to start paying for his travel.
It’s a joke!
There’s legislation in place that stops TfL from restricting passengers using the Freedom Pass during the evening peak. Otherwise this would lead to passengers with passes issued outside London being able to ride on TfL buses within London, while London pensioners would pay fares.
Freedom passes were restricted to after 9.30am until 2010 and then Boris changed it.
One could ask why it is fair a working 60 year old should get free travel when other working people pay. A 60 year old is likely to have fewer expenses.
The Freedom Pass is funded largely by the London Councils consortium. Lewisham pay for pensioners here. TfL fund the pass for the morning peak and overnight. (This is why the pass is only valid on TfL travel modes during the morning peak).
Outside London, pensioner bus passes are only valid between 0930 and 2300 weekdays and all day weekends and bank holidays, so Londoners get a lot more from it than those outside the capital, even with the cuts with the addition of using rail services.
(TfL fully fund the 60+ pass, given to London residents who are under pensionable age).
I’m still waiting for her to bring the bakerloo line into forest Hill which was on her manifesto After they had already made a decision
She made no such promise.
She is currently campaigning for a further extension from New Cross Gate into Lewisham. That plan is only at the consultation phase.
And likely to be scrapped thanks to the new TfL deal with the Government.
Somebody better tell her that someone faked her manifesto and posted it through people’s letterboxes. Would be interested in seeing a copy of the real one if you have it (from both previous elections)
Ellie did say the following, although “constituency” may mean somewhere other than Forest Hill
If the line gets extended to Hayes, it will get into the Lewisham West and Penge constituency.
True. She has been consistent with her messages on the matter of campaigning to bring an extension to the constituency.
A decision to extend the Bakerloo line to New Cross Gate was made. No decision has been made on a further extension.
Strongly disagree.
And frankly most of us who HAVE to still work at 60 and beyond do so because we are in lower paid jobs without the luxury of good pension pots and the option to retire at 60 and cash in.
My expenses are much the same as they always were tbh.
My oyster card was £1500 a year a hefty chunk out of my wages-in effect I work one hour of my 9 hour day just to cover my travel expenses .
Living in London is arguably more expensive in terms of rent and other costs for us over 60’s than if we lived in other towns so the free travel was a real help.
All the issues your describe affect under 60’s too.
If not more given huge rises in London rents and house prices in the last 20 years.
Also anyone under 40 like me won’t retire until 69 at the earliest, as for pension pots for our generation final salary pension pots are a mere folk memory.
The 60+ Oystercard is a great help. A Boris Johnson replacement for the Freedom Pass that Ken Livingston cancelled. If I had known at 40 that I would not be getting my promised state pension at 60 but have to wait until I was 66 for it, I might have at least been able to prepare, as you are lucky enough to be able to do. As it was I was 58 when I found I would not be getting the pension I had paid for all my working life. like the majority of my generation I started work at 16. I will have been paying National Insurance for 50 years when I finally qualify for a state pension at age 66. Trying to get work as a 64 year old is not easy believe me. And for those in heavy, exhausting manual work it’s obscene to have the finishing line moved at such short notice.
Yes times are different. Many more people spend time in higher education nowadays and therefore pay NI for a much shorter period. House prices and rents are higher, but so are salaries. If we were to return to the mortgage interest rates of 16.9% that I had to pay there really would be an outcry.
Oh and I think you’ll find that outside of staff office and government workers (NHS, teaching, civil service etc) final salary pension pots were a bit of a myth anyway.
Nothing to do with Red Ken, the Government raised the pension age, which meant the Freedom Pass also went up in age with the reform in pensions.
(Sorry Mary, the reply was meant for maxrocks).
Most public sector worker haven’t had a final salary pension or retirement at 60 for years.
Also, no one has “paid in” to their state pension. There is no state pension pot, the state pension is a contributions based benefit, no more no less. Hence the need to raise the state pension age.
The reality is that my generation’s working women were told from day one that if we paid our National Insurance we would receive a state pension at age 60. Yes there was a difference with men’s retirement age, but there were also huge differences in our pay and career expectations. State pensions are based on the number of years National Insurance payments one has made. That to my mind is a contract. We kept up our side; successive governments, of all three main political parties did not honour their side.
I was due to collect my state pension in 2014. When Gordon Brown’s moved the goalposts for some, I checked with the appropriate department. I was told I would not be affected.
Then in 2011 I checked again. I would now have to wait a further five years. Less than a year later I checked again; now I would have to wait six years.
If many of us had known that was going to be the case we might have made different choices during our most productive years.
If you have an expectation that if you play by the rules, contracts will be honoured please try to imagine how it feels when at the point you are slowing down, physically tired, maybe with health issues that mean no employer will insure you to do the work that you did, or you’re physically not able to do hard and heavy manual labour (this doesn’t just affect those sitting behind a desk in a warm office) then you’re told - when it’s too late in life for you to plan otherwise - that you will have to work a further six years. You will have to carry on paying National Insurance - whether you’ve got a contract (no hope of finding a staff job - or a contract for that matter - at your age) in order to qualify for the minimum state pension. I couldn’t stop paying my NI in 2014 - with a mere 44 years of NI contributions or I wouldn’t qualify for a full pension when (or if) I reached that always just out of reach finishing line. I have to pay till the day I reach it on my 66th birthday.
I could have done a lot with the £40,000 I would have received over those lost six years.
Many families have gone into debt because of that. Things like the 60+ Oystercard make all the difference for some lucky enough to have found a job in being able to get to it or not.
I couldn’t agree more @marymck!
I don’t disagree with the principle of state pension age equalisation but what is unacceptable is how those women that were going to be affected by the rise from 60 to 65 were not advised by the relevant government department of the time to enable us to plan appropriately, and that most of us only found out decades later.
Just for clarity John Major’s government legislated for equalization of pensionable age to take effect in 2018 back in 1995. Gordon Brown’s government legislated to increase that age to 66 by 2026 stepping up a year in 2036 and again in 2046. David Cameron’s government accelerated that process in 2011 with the next rise to 66 brought forward to 2018.
I note the BackTo60 campaign has been given leave to appeal the 2019 high court decision. I wish them good luck.
They were forced to by an EU directive.
The EU directive you speak of is from 1979. And it called for the equal access of men and women to social services. A principle I think even the Tory party had partly come to agree with by 1995. I’m also certain the decision Majors government made then was partly fiscal when considering the financial burden pensions would have with an aging population living longer.
If the 1979 directive, 16 years later was the sole reason for the Major Government’s actions they could have easily lowered pensionable age for men to 60 or find some middle ground.
If you are suggesting the Government was forced to take an action they didnt want to, it’s worth pointing out it is the same Government which signed the Maastricht Treaty only a few years later.
I can remember talking to TUC officials back in the 80s, when I suggested equalizing the retirement age at 63. Nothing happened. Had we known then, when we were young and strong and at the peak of our earning powers we could have made different life choices.
Not everyone is living longer btw.
Thank you for your good luck wishes @starman But I was actually thinking not just of changes to state pension age, but of the moving the goalposts due to Gordon Brown’s pension tax changes that I believe led to many a final salary pension scheme being scrapped.
Especially men.
The stress endured by some women in their sixties, who didn’t quite make the cut off date to claim their state pension at 60 as expected, can’t be helping their life expectancy.
If I had been born with the same birthday but four years earlier, I would only have had to wait an extra 8 months and 19 days for my full state pension. How they worked that out is a mystery! But if I were born four years earlier than I was, I could have been claiming since September 2011 at 60 years, 8 months and 19 days of age.
As it is I have to wait an extra six years, until I’m 66.
It’s utterly bizarre and the finishing line does keep extending like some nightmarish vanishing point. So it’s worth everyone keeping checking their state retirement ages. You could be in for a shock, as I was.
I’m in same situation as you…and believe me…I’m knackered now…
I agree with you wholeheartedly. I worked as a teaching assistant for 28 years, & a mid-day meal supervisor for 27 years. I was given the chance to lay into the council pensions for both jobs. I also have a small pension from when I worked for Otis elevator co. back in the late 70s.
But I got made redundant in 2016 when I was 62. Because I was born in November 1953, I missed out in getting my state pension at 62 by months.
Because I have rheumatoid arthritis I had the 2nd of the operations on my feet. By the time I got back to normal I was nearly 63! What on earth do you do jobwise at that age!
Luckily enough my husband was still earning a good wage & we had no mortgage. So the 60+ card was of great benefit to me. My husband is now in a much lower paid job & won’t get his state pension for another 2 years when he is 66, so again the 60+ card is of great benefit.
I didn’t comment earlier as I didn’t want to appear as coming across as selfish. But I know how hard it is for the younger generation as well. My small private pensions are the same as paying into the work pensions that the younger generations are paying into now.
Out of interest, on what basis? Anything more to it than the tedious political tit-for-tat alongside a general shortage of money (wherever it may come from)?
I’m just going to wade in here without reading any of the above messages. If TFL takes over
southern rails franchise in the suburbs we’d have a nigh train that didn’t stop at New Cross. That would be the day.
With the Government now pulling the purse strings, TfL are going to have to cut all but essential projects, while attempting to regain the lost revenue due to the lockdown.
Are you describing some alternate dimension where the government didn’t just give TfL a £1.6bn bailout?
Nope. This one where the government waited till it had unconditionally bailed out literally every other transport company except TFL, despite them carrying more passengers per year than every other company combined.
With rather large caveats. They get a seat on the TfL board, have implemented some temporary clauses including restricting the use of Freedom passes on weekdays, scrapped free bus travel for under 18s, with the exception of school children travelling to school within the three mile limit which will be funded by Lewisham Council and so on.
Worth remembering that it was the government who decided to drip feed funding and then stop it together, which has led to the situation where TfL were nearly out of money. I’m no fan of Sadiq Khan, but it’s not all his fault.
The ‘bailout’ is for 4.5 months anyway. Wait and see what the Government demand TfL do or won’t be able to do when a longer term deal is signed.
I see. How much did Southern Rail / Govia get from the government, and when? I’m struggling to find any mention of this online.
The restrictions mentioned by @rbmartin seem reasonable. I’d be a bit miffed if TfL was handing out freebies after getting an extra £1.6bn of our money.
If Chairman Khan hadn’t frozen fares, and if he’d successfully hit the December 2018 Crossrail delivery deadline, TfL would have enjoyed hundreds of millions more in passenger revenue.
Except Crossrail is on target to cost approximately the original projections. Billions were cut from the project for political reasons bit unsurprisingly it cost what was projected anyway.
Also https://www.ft.com/content/2aae48b6-6cde-11ea-89df-41bea055720b regarding rail bailouts
Are you sure?
Err…
We are agreed re. bailouts of rail companies, good.
That’s possibly a red herring as fewer people would have travelled on higher fares, so it might be a bit of a zero-sum game.
See also previous threads on this forum about bus route cuts, which gave some good anectodal evidence on fare sensitivity going as far as people taking the bus all the way to Central London to save a few quid.
There is no proof to support either side of the argument of course.
GoVia unlike TfL is a commercial enterprise so I wouldn’t expect to find such information in the public domain.
But to get an idea about what it might look like at the moment, just check how many trains they’re are running (very many) and then compare with the government charts on transport use, which I think had rail use still shown under 10% of pre-Covid. That’s a pretty hefty revenue hole for treasury to fill.
Of course still it gets lost in the rounding with everything else at the moment, if you consider how for instance these government guaranteed bounce back “loans” have spiralled into the double digit billions in merely a few weeks…
Concession restrictions start on Monday 15th June. 60+ Oyster and Older Persons Freedom Pass will no longer be vaild before 0900 on weekdays.
The Disabled Persons Freedom Pass isn’t affected.
