Transport for London is giving away the equivalent of almost £130 million in free travel passes each year to 38,000 relatives, spouses, friends and flatmates of its staff, Heat Street can reveal.
Thanks to a perk which has existed for decades, TfL gives all of its employees free travel on its bus, tram, tube, train and DLR network.
It also issues each of them with one ‘nominee pass’.
Staff are allowed to give the nominee pass to anybody they wish. The only condition is that they live in the same premises.
Heat Street asked TfL under the Freedom of Information Act how many nominee passes are currently in circulation.
Figures they supplied show that, under the scheme, 18,477 nominee passes have been issued to associates of TfL workers; and 19,342 nominee passes have been given to associates of London Bus staff – a total of 37,819 people.
Each nominee pass entitles the holder to travel at any of time of day within zones 1 to 9.
TfL nominee passes can also be used in some mainline railway stations outside London, making them marginally more expensive than those used by London Bus nominees.
Each TfL nominee pass is currently worth £3,380 on the open market while each London Bus nominee pass would cost a regular commuter £3,368.
The total market value of these nominee passes now stands at £127,596,116 per year.
Regardless of how often the passes are used to their full extent, holders are free to roam London and its environs without ever having to think about paying for a ticket, depriving the transport network of tens of millions of pounds each year.
TfL justifies this by saying that recipients of a nominee pass act as “ambassadors” for the organisation.
At the same time, public sector workers like firemen and nurses are forced to spend thousands of pounds each year on travel.
Questions have also been raised about whether the system is open to fraud.
Conservative Andrew Boff said: “Of course bus drivers, tube drivers and other transport staff should be entitled to free travel, but there is no justification for their friends, flatmates and lodgers receiving these benefits just because they happen to live at the same address. If we scrap this expensive gold-plated perk we could pass the saving back to the travelling public or we’d free up enough cash to fund free Travelcards for our firefighters, who unlike the police don’t get free travel in London. And there would be enough change left over to pay for an extra 175 Routemaster buses to help keep Londoners moving. It’s about time TfL used their common sense and did the right thing.”
Tory mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith has pledged to scrap nominee passes.
His Labour rival, Sadiq Khan, did not respond to questions about his stance on the matter.
A TfL spokesman said: “This benefit is a long-standing part of the terms and conditions of TfL staff. All TfL employees and their nominees are expected to act as ambassadors for TfL, helping assist our customers where necessary.”
