Well, that didn’t take him long. Public transport fares are going up, and it’s all Ken’s fault, of course. Things to note:
- Boris pushed Kulveer Ranger, who hasn’t been seen in weeks, out front to tell us. Nice touch.
- The ‘taking money from the Venezuelan poor’ argument is rubbish, as we’ve seen. Using it is a strong indicator that there’s an exercise in deception in progress – unless the fare rises are to cover the approx £9m annual cost of the income support discount continuing, which hasn’t been announced, you can’t use it.
- Various things – Routemaster, CC changes, extra BTP police, bendy replacement with more smaller buses – are snipping little holes in the budget. These add up, particularly the estimated £100m of the Routemaster. Peter Hendy is on record as saying that the £9m for BTP was found fairly easily by taking bits from various budgets.
- Livingstone is on record as asserting that the fare freeze/cut was (at least partly) paid for by the massive 8-year Viacom advertising deal, which brings in £100m a year and is only a year or so in. The deal brought in a lot more than expected, apparently. Look for a robust response along these lines.
- Where’s the ‘value for money’ you were going to bring in, Boris? Can’t you find a measly £24m in savings to keep the bus fares down, then?
- There’s a strong suggeston that unspecified multiple projects are going to get canned. Bad news all round, there. No strategic vision, no drive, fares up. Welcome to Conservative rule. We did warn you.
- This announcement will result in people (me, for a start) digging up all those insinuations that Ken’s TfL was responsible for massive fare increases and London’s transport system is expensive. Here’s Roger Evans (who doesn’t really deserve it – he’s hardly Phil Taylor in the obnoxious Tory stakes, but he was chairman of the Transport Committee at the time):
“It is good for Londoners to have their prices frozen,” said Roger Evans, from the London Assembly Conservatives.
“But we’ve got to bear in mind that that they have gone up by more than the rate of inflation in the past three years so we already have a very expensive public transport system here.”
The point being that you can’t seriously blame him for simultaneously a) putting the fares up and b) keeping them down. I’m sure they’ll try, though.
- Where on earth in London is the tube fare £6.30?
Update – Livingstone’s predictable angry response. I don’t particularly want to be a mouthpiece for old Ken, but since he’s being given the blame, he gets to respond:
‘”Londoners are beginning to learn the high cost of Boris Johnson.
“Boris Johnson promised to save Londoners money but instead, after just a few months in office, he is pushing up fares above inflation to pay for his own incredible waste of Londoners’ money.
“Boris Johnson has lost between £30 and £50 million a year by abandoning the £25 a-day charge on the worst gas guzzlers in the congestion charging zone, he has scrapped the cheap oil deal with Venezuela, costing London £16 million a year, and he may throw away a lot more by abandoning the extension of the congestion charge to Kensington and Chelsea.
“This situation is likely to get worse. Experts agree that his pledge to bring in a new ‘routemaster’ bus would cost over £100 million a year.
“Londoners are now having to pay through the nose for Boris Johnson’s wrong policy decisions and waste.”
Actually, Ken needs to update his spreadsheet – the latest Venezuela Cashwatch comes in at nearly £18m thanks to the plummeting pound.
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Another budget buster – the Western Extension consultation is estimated to cost between £500k and £1m. Add it to the charge sheet…
You’ve got to love the Evening Standard.
In their main article they give Johnson half the space to jusftify the rise. Livingstone is given just one line to defend himself – which completely cuts out the core of his argument.
Their Leader Comment then goes into full-assault mode.
Finally, just for good measure, Johnson is given a column on the same day to explain (blame).
Then again right-to-reply has never been a strong point of the Standard.
[...] Politics, tram, Transport Not content with pushing up bus and tube fares to fill an entirely self-inflicted budgetary black hole, it now appears that Boris Johnson has, in a throw-away remark to the London Assembly Budget [...]
It is straightforward to demonstrate Livingstone’s wishful thinking and dissimulation. In February last year Livingstone wrote to me to say that bus subsidies would be £463 million in 2006/7 and £528 million in 2007/8. The outcome, as reported in TfL’s Draft Annual Report and Accounts, was £617 million in 2006/7 and £659 million in 2007/8. That’s £285 million lost in just two years.
No wonder Boris is having to take tough action now.
Phil: if Livingstone’s budget was so problematic, how do you explain the GLA’s Executive Director of Finance and Performance, Martin Clarke, saying that Ken’s figures had in fact been balanced?
Can you seriously dispute that a number of Boris’s decisions (if it was he who actually took them) have directly led to a need for TfL to raise fares? The most obvious examples are:
1. The abolition of the CO2 charge, creating a £30-50m black hole in the budget. This at least had the defence that it was a clear manifesto pledge and a small fare rise was an obvious consequence of denying TfL this income so people got what they voted for.
2. The Venezuela farce. If you’re going to abolish a source of income offering £17m a year to fund a specific scheme, you can’t then chicken out of abolishing the scheme it funded! Obviously whichever hard-headed Policy Exchange type pushed through the cancellation of the deal so quickly didn’t consider the possibility that doubling fares for the poor might not be a defensible move, but the upshot is a further £17m black hole.
That’s a black hole of up to £67m already, just from those two. Boris was only claiming an £80m black hole as necessitating the fare rises yesterday, and once you add in the costs of the Western Extension consultation and projections of lost revenue from the middle-of-the-day free period they look like introducing, and the costs of the ridiculous Routemaster competition (not to mention the costs further down the line of actually trying to build and introduce the thing), it’s going to be awfully close to Boris’s £80m figure without needing to bring anything Ken-related into the equation.
Let’s face it, also: Boris is going to quote the highest possible figure he thinks he can back up under scrutiny as to what Ken’s supposed black hole amounts to. The situation therefore is one of the following:
(a) Boris and Ken share the blame for this roughly equally, based on my comments above and the figure quoted by Boris as being attributable to Ken;
(b) Boris (and in the case of manifesto pledges, a million misguided voters) is (are) to blame for the black hole in its entirety, based on the comments by Martin Clarke;
(c) you, or someone else, can explain how all the things I’ve mentioned that have been decided upon since 2 May and clearly and unarguably lead to extra expenditure or reduced income, er, don’t actually do anything of the sort.
I await your explanation of why it is (c) with great interest; in the absence of such, I shall conclude that Boris is indeed lying when he blames Ken alone for the fare rise.
People on income support were due to lose their half-fare entitlement this month so not only are their fares rising by 100pc but, come the new year, they will be liable to a further 10pc rise on London’s buses. Perhaps the Evening Standard would like to run and editorial on how decent this policy is. Trouble is, people on income support are more likely to be those the rest of society forgets about.
[...] Jones first pointed out that the average Band D home would save just 11 pence per week thanks to Boris’s much trumpeted freeze on the GLA council tax precept, whereas she reckoned the typical commuter would be £4 per week worse off through the fare rises Boris has instituted at TfL thanks to his self-dug black hole. [...]