Khan says his fare-dodging crackdown is working. It isn't.

Today, the Mayor launched a £7 million campaign to fight what he calls a "dark blizzard of disinformation" spreading online about London. But last week his own snow blower was in full flow on fare evasion.

Last April, the Mayor and TfL launched a “bold new plan” to tackle fare evasion. On Wednesday they announced the results of the first year and declared "new figures show that it's working." But they show exactly the opposite, so at Friday's Mayor's Questions I put the real figures to him.

▶ Watch the exchange here

It didn't go well for him. Here's what the headlines left out.

Fare evasion this year is running at 3.5% of journeys. Last year it was also 3.5%.

That’s it. That’s the result. A year of the “bold new plan” made no difference. But for some reason that figure, the only one that actually measures success, was missing from Wednesday’s announcement.

Everything else was in there: officers deployed, checks carried out, fines issued, money spent. Just not the number that tells you whether any of it workedk, and we all know why.

When I put the flat 3.5% to him in the chamber, the Mayor claimed it had fallen from 3.9% to 3.5%. It hasn't. TfL's own website shows 3.5% this year and 3.5% the year before.

Here’s the bit the Mayor really doesn’t want you to remember.

The plan, back in 2022, was to cut fare evasion to 1% by last year. That’s the grey dotted line on the graph above. Sadly, we didn’t get to 1%, we got to nearly four times that, but when the plan failed rather than admit that the Mayor just stopped mentioning it. It was never spoken of again.

Instead, the target was quietly relaxed from 1% to 1.5%, and the deadline pushed back from 2025 to 2031. Then the whole thing was re-announced as a “bold new plan to tackle fare evasion.” Same problem, weaker target, later deadline, louder press release.

The Mayor’s fallback is to talk tough on enforcement. So let’s look at enforcement.

This year TfL secured 14,406 convictions but before the pandemic, it was close to 30,000. In other words, enforcement activity has roughly halved since 2019/20. The courts aren’t the bottleneck because TfL wins almost every case it brings, it’s just bringing half as many.

Is that a tough crackdown?

And the £100 penalty fare, raised to be more of a “deterrent”? Only 46% of fare evasion fines were paid last year, so apparently most of the people who don’t pay their fare don’t pay the fine either!

This is the bit I find most telling, and I’m not sure how many people realised this.

That “bold new strategy,” unveiled with much excitement in April 2025? It wasn’t new. It was published eighteen months earlier. The Commissioner’s own report to the TfL Board of 18 October 2023 spells it out in black and white.

He said TfL would deliver:

“...the target published in our strategy to reduce fare evasion by two-thirds, to under 1.5 per cent by 2030.”

So the “new” target, the “new” deadline and the “new” strategy announced in April 2025 really date back to 2023. The April 2025 launch, with the Commissioner and Chief Operating Officer out on the platforms for the cameras, was a re-announcement of a plan that was already a year and a half old.

Few things are more annoying than watching someone casually bump through the wide gate when you’re queuing up to pay your fare, and on TfL’s own figures they cost the rest of us £190 million per year in lost fare income.

I’ve met the frontline staff who tackle it at the sharp end, doing a difficult and sometimes physically dangerous job. They deserve leadership that is honest about what’s happening and serious about how to fix it.

Instead they get a press release that hides the truth in a blizzard of misleading numbers, a target quietly watered down, and a two-year-old plan dressed up as a fresh idea.

The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one, so we can’t have an honest debate about what would really bring fare dodging down until the Mayor admit his plan isn’t working. And when the Mayor next warns Londoners about a “dark blizzard of misinformation,” I’d suggest he start by looking in the mirror.