There’s a map I like to look at, when I want to cheer myself up with some nerdy London transport goodness. It’s not one of those (believe me, there are many) that imagines vast numbers of new lines, a suspiciously high proportion of which serve the area in which the map-maker lives: the only new tracks it proposes, the Elizabeth line and the Barking Riverside extension, were both already on the table when TfL produced the map in 2016.
What the “Prospective London Overground services” map does show is a vision of a world in which the network has expanded, to take in almost but not quite all of London’s national rail network. The idea of bringing services to Bromley, Dartford and Surbiton under TfL control was a fantasy, back in 2016, but an entirely plausible one: all the routes shown were part of franchises whose contracts have since come up for renewal. It would have been quite possible to devolve their suburban branches to TfL.
But hopes of an orange revolution were dashed by Chris Grayling, who likened it to “deckchair shifting”. That December, the Standard revealed a letter in which the then Transport Secretary made clear his real motive: preventing yet more transport services from potentially falling into the hands of a Labour mayor. The needs of passengers didn’t come into it. All this was five years ago, since when the world has changed. Then, Conservative ministers limited TfL’s ambition. Now they threaten to cut it off at the knees.
The story has been told many times. Changes introduced by the Coalition made London’s transport network unusually dependent on funding from fares, so that the capital’s pandemic was accompanied by the near-breakdown of the Tube and buses, and despite repeated bailouts, the Government has yet to provide any long-term security. The latest twist is the biggest fare increase in more than a decade, with average fares up by 4.8 per cent and single bus ones up by nearly 6.5 per cent. This will help plug the hole in TfL’s finances, but it won’t help enough. It’s also an odd fit with the Government’s stated aim for the UK to reach net zero by 2030.
It’s hard to avoid wondering if there’s a whiff of low politics about this. Austerity has bitten harder in Labour-voting areas than Tory ones, and the £1 billion levelling up fund unveiled by Rishi Sunak last March went overwhelmingly to areas represented by Tory MPs (not all of which, it’s worth noting, needed much levelling up).
Is it really that fanciful to wonder whether the repeated failure to put London’s transport on a financially secure footing is motivated in part by a Grayling-esque irritation that the city has for two elections running opted for a Labour mayor? Vote the wrong way, runs the extremely subtle subtext, and this is the result. You can understand the instinctive appeal pork-barrel politics would have for the governing party, in both rewarding voters and quietening fractious backbenchers. It remains a terrible way to decide how to distribute money, and an even worse one to ensure a major world city can continue to function.
London’s economy is, after all, still the biggest net contributor to the Treasury, its tax revenues underwriting spending elsewhere in the country. This is not a situation much appreciated by those on either end of the deal, but leaving London facing a cliff edge will do nothing to move us past it: the more likely outcome is simply to threaten those tax revenues.
TfL has helpfully come up with a plan that would put it back on the path to financial stability from 2023 onwards: it just needs some reliable bridging funding to get there. After that it would still need support for major capital projects — it’s hard to see a path to Crossrail 2, say, that doesn’t involve a chat with the Treasury — but it wouldn’t need to go cap in hand to Westminster every few months like we’ve seen since 2020. A government genuinely ambitious for its capital would go further, devolving more power and allowing local government to raise its own revenues — even if that meant accepting sometimes decisions will be taken by politicians from the other side of the aisle.
Perhaps that is asking too much. What is not asking too much, though, is that the national government should stop playing politics with Londoners’ lives and London’s economy. It’s one thing to block TfL’s empire building; quite another to force it to cut services altogether. Managed decline will do many things to the city: making it more likely to vote Tory isn’t one of them.
What do you think is the reason for TfL’s funding crisis? Let us know in the comments below.
