Londoners deserve a fares freeze as well

HubMP2012

NOVEMBER 30, 2025

By Murad Qureshi

After the Chancellor froze train fares in her long-awaited Budget speech for the rest of the country, there is a very good case for the same happening in London as well.

Now the simplest interpretation of this would be that Transport for London keeps fares at current levels rather than implementing the planned 3.6% rise.

A transparent back-of-the-envelope calculation on what a TfL fare freeze would roughly cost begins with the fact that TfL passenger (fare) revenue was £5 billion in fiscal year 2024/25.

Using the passenger revenue and the planned increase, the cost of not taking that increase is approximately £180 million per year of foregone revenue. A useful comparator here is when the Mayor previously identified £123m of GLA funding to freeze fares for a year in an earlier package.

Alternatively, if TfL instead matched a higher national rail-style freeze (say 4.6% which applies to some regulated fares), then approximately £230 million per year in lost revenue would result.

Some caveats will of course need to be made, as the real number could vary. Firstly not all fares move by the same percentage (some are nationally regulated; some TfL sets itself), thus the total loss depends on which fare types are frozen.

Secondly we have the ridership effects — fare freezes can slightly increase journeys (or limit passengers lost to higher fares), changing the yield, but l wouldn’t be surprised if TfL’s passenger income is also sensitive to journey counts and ticket mix.

Thirdly, TfL’s published “gross service income” is split by mode (Underground, buses, Elizabeth line, etc.). A more accurate model would apply different percentage changes to those mode-specific revenues. The 3.6 / 4.6% figures are applied here as a single average for simplicity.

And finally, the figures above are annual ones — a one-year freeze costs roughly the amount calculated for that year, as of course multi-year freezes multiply the impact unless offset by other measures (savings, grants).

So in summary, a TfL fare freeze that simply cancels a 3.6% planned rise would cost roughly £180m a year, using a £5 billion passenger income baseline. If larger regulated increases (4–5%) were avoided across the board the cost could be in the £230m a year range, or higher if you use a larger passenger income base.

This has of course been done before by the Mayor and during a cost of living crisis. You would think it is doable again. It is just a question of what level one should implement against the national trend now set by the Chancellor.

Murad Qureshi was a member of the London Assembly from 2004 to 2016 and from 2020 to 2021. http://www.muradqureshi.com/ @MuradQureshiLDN

Image: 1967 Stock train at Finsbury Park in 2010. Creator: Tom Page  Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic