The famous “Fares Fair" scheme, by which some Labour members of the Greater London Council tried to ease London Transport's financial worries (and win some votes), pleased some people but enraged just as many more. Some complained that reduced fares were being paid for by higher rates while businesses claimed the increase would drive them to the wall and cause even more unemployment.
In the end the scheme was thrown out by the House of Lords and LT fares were doubled in March. This decision greatly pleased those other reformers, the Tories, but it did not solve LTs financial problems — the consequence was a massive jump in fare-dodging.
This fare-dodging has been a longstanding worry for LT but just recently it has come to a head because of several articles in the London evening newspaper, the Standard. Its August 10 article Find the Fare Fiddlers was all too reminiscent of similar headlines during the last two decades.
Back in January 1971 the Socialist Standard carried an article on this subject. At that time LT claimed to be losing only £1 million yearly due to fare-dodging, but as the article in the Socialist Standard stated: "The signs are that London Transport’s figure of £1 million . . . will be shown to be hopelessly underestimated”. In 1972 LT admitted that the losses were £5 million. By 1978 the figure was £12 million and in 1982 the loss is expected to be an astonishing £30 million — or over 5 per cent of LT's total income.
In 1966 plans were made to instal automatic ticket gates to control passenger entrance and exit. This was to have cost £10 million at 1966 prices but the rapidly escalating costs of the system have resulted in its partial introduction only. As most stations have no automatic gates many passengers simply pay the collector at the other end a fraction of the real cost of the journey.
In the past you could hand over a fivepenny piece and walk through the barrier with no trouble at all. but nowadays there is a marked change in the attitude of the collectors. They arc much more zealous in their duties, not out of any new-found loyalty to LT, but because many of them realise that the more they collect in excess fares the more they can keep for themselves. LT reckon that another £10 million is being lost to staff using this method, plus a variety of ingenious variations.
Not that Underground employees gel all of this £10 million to themselves, for LT’s bus conductors also have ways of keeping part of what they collect. These include the use of Black and Decker drilling machines to wind back the counters on ticket machines and. according to the Standard newspaper article, more than 2,000 of LT’s 13.000 bus conductors have already been cautioned for fiddling fares.
This conflict between LT and its employees is actually part of the ceaseless struggle between employees and employers, whether the latter be private companies or state or municipal concerns. The main bone of contention is usually wages and conditions of work but workers will also claw back a bit of what they can't get legally. Rare indeed is the worker who never goes for a read or does a “homer” in the company's time, never uses the photocopier for his or her own purpose, never takes home the company’s stationery or arrives late or leaves early. And it’s the same with the army of fare-dodgers. True, they aren’t employees of LT (no doubt many of them think LT belongs to them!) but hard-up workers will always try to supplement their earnings with a bit of free travel if they can.
Vic Vanni
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