In just over six years, I’m due to join the best club in London. It won’t serve G&Ts, restrict women or provide leather armchairs for an afternoon snooze. But it comes with an invaluable plastic membership card: the 60+ Oyster.
Yes, after almost 30 years as a Londoner, I’ll finally qualify for free travel on the capital’s buses, Tubes and trains. I won’t be the only one. Sadiq Khan (born in 1970) will qualify a few months ahead of me. Will I deserve it? As I hope still to be working by then, the honest answer has to be: probably not.
The issue of travel concessions is back in the news. As I reported yesterday, London councils face a £500m annual bill for providing the Freedom Pass, which replaces the 60+ Oyster when State pension age is reached.
About 1.3 million Londoners have a 60+ Oyster or a Freedom Pass. Hundreds of thousands of children and teenagers also enjoy free or discounted travel in the capital, courtesy of the various incarnations of the Zip card. As do the 26,000 employees of Transport for London – and 54,000 of their friends and family – who receive free annual Oyster cards. How much are all these travel concessions costing? And how many people actually pay the full fare? Despite spending a day researching the issue, neither question is easy to answer.
Let’s start with what we do know. TfL estimates that in the 2024 calendar year, it will forego £419m of fares revenue because of the multitude of travel concessions on offer. The biggest chunk relates to the fares not paid by the over 60s – £125m a year. Of this, about £80m a year is “lost” due to the 60+ Oyster. Providing half-price travel to children under 16 costs £115m a year. Fair enough, many parents – myself included – may think.
But those TfL “friends and family freebies”, or “nominee passes” in the official parlance, have a face value in excess of £160m a year. (TfL, in its defence, says it does not lay on additional Tube trains or buses to cater for these lucky people.)
During the pandemic, TfL was close to bankruptcy
During the pandemic, TfL was close to bankruptcy. It needed Government bailouts in excess of £4bn. As a condition of the loans, Mr Khan was told to pare back the freebies. In 2020, he temporarily – and then permanently – banned the use of the 60+ Oyster and Freedom Pass before 9am, generating about £15m more a year in fares.
He also considered increasing the qualifying age for the 60+ Oyster by six months a year for the next 12 years, until the qualifying age matched that of the Freedom Pass, meaning it could then be phased out. This would have been a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But he chickened out.
Then he expanded the availability of discounted travel to include Tube cleaners, sub-contracted Tube cleaners and care leavers. In my view, if you clean the Tube, you deserve to travel on it for free. But 60-something Londoners still in employment don’t. Why? Because their free ride means higher fares for the rest of us.
These benefits aren't free
TfL has told me that 60 per cent of adults on the buses and 86 per cent on the Tube pay the full fare – an average of 70 per cent across the TfL network. The 60+ Oyster was introduced by Boris Johnson as mayor in 2012 when Freedom Pass eligibility was changed in line with changes to the State pension age for women. The aim was to provide for those who had chosen, or been forced, to retire early. It meant Londoners received travel benefits not available to the rest of the country. But these aren’t free. The reason the mayor keeps hiking his share of council tax is to help fund these travel perks.
More than half of Londoners aged 60 to 64 are still in work. About one in five use their 60+ Oyster for work-related travel. Times have changed. It’s time to phase out the 60+ Oyster. Perhaps ease the pain by offering a free bus pass. We don’t want more people getting back in their cars, especially for short journeys.
But it’s time to start calling time on TfL’s freebies. Even if it means I’ll never join the best club in town.
Ross Lydall is City Hall Editor & Transport Editor
