Cash-strapped Transport for London has turned things around – by hitting motorists with higher charges and issuing more of them too
It is a suspicion that will be familiar to anyone who has driven a car for more than ten minutes in London. When trying to navigate the maze of one-way streets, bus lanes, and low traffic neighbourhoods – not to mention the congestion charging zone and the ultra-low emissions zone (ULEZ) for older vehicles – it feels impossible to get it right. Are they actually wanting you to get it wrong, so they can pick up the income from the penalties?
Early figures from Transport for London’s (TfL) next set of annual accounts, obtained by the Press Association, certainly suggest this might be the case: revenue from what TfL euphemistically calls “road network compliance income” hit just under £90 million last year, up from just under £57 million five years ago.
That does not include income from people actually paying the congestion charge, which was £358 million in the last published accounts, or the ULEZ charge (a hefty £480 million) – but instead is just the money TfL has pocketed from fining misbehaving motorists. It also is not a count of the total cost of traffic tickets in London.
TfL is only responsible for fines on London’s 367 miles of “red routes”, those deemed critical to keeping the capital moving. Other roads are outside of its remit.
The income from these routes, though, is a rare ray of sunshine in what has been a tough few years financially for TfL, which is responsible for all of London’s public transport and which oversees its road network too.
A huge drop in passenger numbers during Covid persisted for longer than expected due to many commuters working from home for part of the week post-pandemic, while London mayor Sadiq Khan, who chairs TfL, repeatedly clashed with Conservative ministers over the scale of government support needed to get the organisation through a financial squeeze.
Critics of the Labour mayor, including former Tory transport secretary Mark Harper and mayoral candidate Susan Hall, have accused him of being “unable to balance the books” and “treating Londoners like walking cash machines”.
In recent years, TfL had to endure multiple rounds of cutbacks, and emergency bailouts from central government, not least due to the huge drop in passenger numbers during lockdowns and pandemic-era restrictions.
The deficits were forecast to peak at £1.5 billion during 2020, but these were reduced to £200 million through cost-cutting, scaling back investment, and emergency government funding.
This year, TfL seems to have turned things around with a surplus of £138 million, which will be used to fund investment, though this will amount to a much smaller outlay than the reductions it implemented as part of its bailout terms.
Such a recovery has inevitably prompted accusations from motorists that they are being purposely targeted as a source of income by TfL. “Dick Whittington would now say that London’s streets are paved with fines,” the AA’s head of road policy has said.
Do the motorists have a point? The figures would suggest they do. Back in 2019, when TfL collected £57 million in fine income, that was around 1 per cent of its total revenues. In its latest accounts, TfL’s fine income has risen to 1.5 per cent of its total. That might not sound like much, but it means that where once it was £1 in every £100 TfL took in, it is now £1 in every £65 or so.
One obvious question to ask is why TfL’s income has risen so much – has something happened in London to make people much worse drivers? Part of the answer (some might say the boring part) is simply that TfL has increased the size of the fines for most penalty charge notices.
Until the end of 2021, those who broke the rules would receive a £130 penalty notice, which would be ‘discounted’ to £65 if it was paid without contest within two weeks of being received. But in January, 2022, that was raised to £160, discounted to £80. This is a fairly sizeable 23 per cent hike, but given it came amid several years of sustained inflation, was roughly in line with other rising prices.
Crucially, it is not anywhere near the overall size of the increase: while each ticket is 23 per cent higher, total revenue from tickets is up 58 per cent. TfL is not just charging higher fines, it is issuing more of them. A large part of how it is doing this is simply with better technology.
Almost all of TfL’s traffic cameras are smart. There is no need for human involvement between a driver running a red light, travelling in a bus lane, or some other offence, and a penalty notice landing on their door.
TfL’s traffic cameras are all networked and automated, and all use Automated Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technology – a basic form of the same kind of AI system that now powers ChatGPT and other cutting-edge AI systems – to read the registration plate.
This is automatically cross-referenced against databases and used to auto-generate a letter. If you incur a fine in London, there is every chance the letter letting you know has been generated before you even get home. According to one insider, TfL does have some cameras set up with more advanced AI, some of them experimental, but these are more about predicting and monitoring traffic flows and looking for incidents, and are not yet used for enforcement.
Regular London drivers know that TfL’s cameras are effective and reliable – but they also know where they are. “It’s all or nothing,” one regular cyclist complains. “You can count on drivers to do the right thing on the junctions with cameras, even at the dead of night, because they’ll be fined. But if they know there’s no cameras there, it’s as bad as ever.”
This is where TfL seem to have deployed a secret weapon in recent years, and one that might account for their bumper income from fines: It has managed to make its high-tech cameras mobile, too.
It began rolling out just five mobile laser cameras in January 2022, and even with so few devices managed to issue 50,000 fines from them in their first year of operation alone. The mobile cameras are particularly focused on speeding, which was made a priority for TfL in 2018. The organisation’s own statistics show a huge increase in speeding fines since it rolled out that new plan – it issued 160,000 speeding tickets in 2018/19, which rocketed to 650,000 by 2022/23.
A common grumble among motorists is that they are being targeted for revenue that mostly does not benefit them, as it’s used to fund the underground and London buses. TfL does try to enforce fare-dodging on these services, but it’s a much harder task, even with the technological advancements of recent years – such as facial recognition.
TfL did carry out a pilot with cameras using artificial intelligence in one station last year, Willesden Green, focusing on fare evasion. Automatically issuing fines is much more difficult in this scenario, though, as there is a much higher error rate on facial recognition than number plate recognition, and fare dodgers by definition do not tap in with a card that might confirm their identity either. Instead, the tech was used to try to identify the most frequent offenders to take action against them, which might reduce fare dodging, but which is unlikely to become the same kind of money spinner as fining motorists.
TfL needs more money from as many sources as possible to keep operating and to keep fares low, which it argues is essential to keep London attractive to businesses and to tourists. Almost every source of revenue will prove unpopular with someone – but there is, on paper at least, one place it could collect money.
Data obtained by Substacker and transport expert James O’Malley shows that TfL is owed more than £100 million in unpaid fees and fines from a small group of serially offending motorists, money it has perpetually failed to rake in.
That’s because those offenders have diplomatic immunity. TfL does not exempt embassies or their staff from the congestion charge or from other fines, but it is unable to go to court to enforce penalties in such instances, so many of those charged simply ignore the sanctions.
That means that embassies owe huge sums in backdated fines. Top of the offending list is the US embassy (£14.6 million), embassy of Japan (£10 million) and the office of the Indian high commissioner (£8.6 million). TfL’s cameras might be hard to escape, but at least there’s one hope – you could always marry a diplomat.
