‘Don’t blame the mayor and TfL for the restrictions on the Freedom Pass’

• FOR, I think, the third time your paper has published a letter (Elaine Chambers, October 14) quite wrongly criticising Transport for London and the mayor, Sadiq Khan, for making Freedom Passes ineligible for travel between 4.30am and 9am – and, as she says, one previous letter was from the same correspondent.

It obviously needs reiterating that this penalisation of older travellers is entirely the fault of the Tory government not the current Mayor of London or TfL.

In 2015, when he was Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson did a deal with the then Conservative chancellor, George Osborne, that cut off all TfL’s central government funding, making it entirely reliant on fares and trading for its income.

When the pandemic struck in 2020 bus and tube travel plummeted by 90 per cent, taking TfL to the edge of bankruptcy.

Eventually, and reluctantly, the Treasury agreed to provide financial support but compelled TfL to make serious cuts in return; including the suspension of freedom passes for early-morning travel and reduced free travel for young people, and to extend Congestion Charge hours, solely to raise revenue.

Your correspondent is entirely right that it is now much more expensive for pensioners to get to early hospital or other appointments, but wrong to lambast TfL staff for applying rules that were unwillingly imposed on them.

If she wants to vent her fury at the callousness of a policy that hits some of those least able to afford it the hardest, she should write instead to the former mayor, now prime minister Boris Johnson, who set the whole chain of events in motion by making a deal to undermine the funding of London’s public transport system.

And to the current chancellor, whose department is obviously on a mission to level-down London residents.

DON KELLER, N15