James Ford: It’s not just ‘lawless London’ that should worry us, but also the ‘Unsafe Underground’

James Ford is a political columnist for City AM and a former transport policy adviser to Boris Johnson when he was Mayor of London.

Sadiq Khan would love for people to stop using the expression “Lawless London”. He It really seems to calm the little guy down.. He is very keen that everyone adheres to the false narrative that he is winning the war on crime in London. To suggest that London is anything but a crime-free utopia is, in Khan’s mind, a pernicious, right-wing dystopian illusion intended to denigrate the metropolis, a Trumpian trope and the result of a “dark blizzard of misinformation» online supported by Beijing and the Kremlin.

I don’t want to accuse the Mayor of indulging in very typical left-wing paranoia, but the popular perception that crime in London is bad and something that the public actually cares about is not purely the making of a cabal of Kremlin-controlled chatbots. It is not Vladimir Putin (but rather the mayor’s own protection agents) who left a bag of weapons unattended on a south London street. It was not Red China that orchestrated a crowd of young people from the capital to recently besieged an M&S branch in Clapham. And when M&S came forward to accuse Khan of being soft on crimehe did it of his own free will, not at the behest of Donald Trump/Benjamin Netanyahu/Elon Musk (delete according to your leftist illusion).

The Mayor could boast of having finally begun to know the annual number of assassinations committed in the capital. down (even if it’s always higher than in 2014, when Boris was mayor), but many other crime statistics are unfortunately trending in the wrong direction. Take for example the transportation network. We all know that TfL seems to be losing the battle against graffiti on tube trains (cost to the taxpayer: £11 million per year) and has practically given up on fighting fare fraud (cost for the fare in terms of loss of income: £190 million per year). But what about more serious offenses? In 2025, sexual offenses on the London Underground averaged 2.6 assaults per day, according to the the highest level in five years. It should therefore come as no surprise to anyone that an online petition for cars reserved for women received 15,000 signatures last year. The situation has become so bad for bus users that the London Youth Assembly recently called for “purge kits” to be installed on high-risk bus routes to help stabbed passengers.

Nor are passengers the only ones suffering from a demonstrably less safe transport system. Numbers obtained by the GLA in February revealed that the number of assaults on TfL staff or contractors doubled last year to around 200 a week. The scale of the violence is particularly serious on the bus network. Between October and December 2025, there were 1,324 violent incidents against bus drivers in London – a tripling from the same period in 2024. (Given how often Sadiq Khan likes to brag about being the son of a bus driver, he should feel particular shame at this statistic.)

Against this backdrop of anti-social behaviour, crime and public anxiety, we shouldn’t be all that surprised that TfL continues to struggle to return passenger numbers to pre-pandemic levels. If the Elizabeth line continues to exceed expectations, the opposite is true for the rest of the network. There was 62 million fewer bus trips between April and December 2025 than in the same period in 2024. London Underground passenger numbers have not met targets and demand on the DLR is also falling. (Customer satisfaction with TfL was constantly decreasing under the current mayor anyway – from 86 per cent in 2016/17 to 78 per cent in 2022/23 – producing the longest continuous decline on record). In 2023/24 just 54 percent of Londoners respondents agree with the statement that “TfL cares about its customers”. According to TfL surveysIn the first half of 2025, 39 percent of passengers reported feeling worried when using the capital’s transport network. Nearly one in ten Londoners said they had been put off using public transport (temporarily or permanently) after experiencing a “worrying incident” on the transport system. (“Worrying incident” seems to be TfL’s preferred euphemism for witnessing crime or being scared on the transport network; and we should all be concerned that it happens so often that they have deliberately sought a substitute term).

The planned program of significant and sustained price increases until the end of the decade It is unlikely to improve customer attitudes or halt the decline in passenger numbers. These price increases should costs Londoners an extra £168 million every year. It’s a lot more expensive to pay for a trip on a train adorned with graffiti, where you’re more likely to be groped or have a member of staff assaulted than just a few years ago. This is not just a public safety issue (which would be bad enough): it could well become a serious economic issue for TfL’s financial future.

The decline of London’s transport network is not an AI-generated fiction but a daily experience of Londoners. These are, remember, TfL’s own statistics and not a “dark blizzard of misinformation”. The mayor might dispute the idea that London is “lawless”, but he will be hard-pressed to argue that the Tube – and the public transport system more generally – has become not only more unruly but downright dangerous under his leadership. The more Londoners face “worrying incidents” when using the transport network, the more urgent it becomes that Sadiq Khan faces his own “negative popularity event” at the polls in 2028.