Transport for London: Funding

Sam Tarry Excerpts

Monday 30th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Sam Tarry (Ilford South) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I thank the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Elliot Colburn) and the Petitions Committee for the debate. I draw Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and declare that I was proudly a trade union officer dealing with Transport for London at the time of the previous Conservative Mayor, seeing at first hand the insane obsession with £400,000 buses and failing schemes such as the garden bridge that cost an eye-watering amount of money and did not even build a bridge over the Thames. To take lectures from Conservative Members about that poppycock —to use one of the Prime Minister’s terms—is simply unbelievable. They are right, however, that the root cause of the problem goes back beyond covid-19 to the cutting of the operating grant.

For a long time, London’s transport system has been the jewel in the crown of this country’s transport infrastructure; every major railway line stops here to serve the rest of our nation as the economic engine. Yet we are the only country in western Europe to have pulled nearly £1 billion of the main subsidy from that transport system, which moves millions of people in and out of London every single day. That is the root cause of the problem. I have seen at first hand how the previous Mayor and the current Mayor have had to suffer the consequences of that decision.

In all honesty, there needs to be a settlement—a real one that is actually sustainable for Londoners. As hon. Members on both sides of the House have said, London is an economic driver. Although many people are having to work at home at the moment, which may be a fundamental change, the reality is that TfL will not be able to wash its face when 70% of its fares have gone completely.

Let us give the Mayor of London credit where credit is due. He successfully forced the Government to give up their plans to scrap free travel for older and younger Londoners, alongside their ill-conceived attempt, which almost caused a riot, to extend the congestion charge to my constituency of Ilford South on the border of the A406. That was a nakedly political move to hit the Mayor of London, and I believe it would be as deeply unpopular in east London as in many west London constituencies. Clearly, it was thrown straight out the window when constituents made their voices heard.

Again, those negotiations went down to the wire. The funding deal was agreed by the Government only 17 minutes before the deadline. That is not the way to run a system that supports millions of people travelling to work, even during the covid-19 crisis. The deal also came with huge strings, including £160 million of additional savings this financial year. On the facility time for trade unions, under Sadiq, relationships have been far better than they were under the Prime Minister, who would not even pick up the phone to me or any of my colleagues for four years. Megaphone diplomacy through the pages of the Evening Standard is not the way to run our capital city’s transport system.

Despite what was written in black and white in a letter from the Transport Secretary to the Mayor, the Government and, of course, Shaun Bailey, the Conservative candidate, are pretending that Sadiq chose to impose those conditions on Londoners. Londoners will not be taken for fools; they know that the Prime Minister wrongly said on the Floor of the House that the Mayor had bankrupted TfL before the pandemic. To use another of his phrases, that is simply balderdash. There is no possible way that radical change would not have been needed when 90% of footfall disappeared almost overnight.

The knock-on impact of the financial crisis is that young people in my constituency, which is one of the most diverse in London, now face having their zip card taken away from them. That is what allows them to travel across London and, when we are out of covid-19, to visit museums and the local library to study. As the Child Poverty Action Group has said, those are the children whose parents will have to decide whether to put food on the table because they suddenly have to pay for their child to travel to school. Let us not have a north-south divide. Why not level up the north, rather than level down London?