Londoners are paying more than a billion pounds a year to staff the London Underground, with the Tube accounting for two-thirds of Transport for London’s annual salary bill.
Responding to a question from London Assembly Member Richard Tracey, Boris Johnson has revealed it cost £1.05 billion to staff the Tube in the 2011/12 financial year, with all other TfL staff costing a further £466.3 million.
In the same financial year TfL’s management layers cost London fare and taxpayers £40.7 million, two-thirds of what it spent on in-house engineers (£64.1 million).
The figures exclude the costs of contractors and staff employed by private companies delivering TfL services.
I hope soon to have more information on the level of salaries and bonuses within TfL.
On June 1st I asked for details of staff numbers, salaries, bonus for the previous 8 years. True to its aversion to public scrutiny, TfL has repeatedly delayed providing this information, claiming that various draft answers – which have never been released to me – were found insufficient just before being authorised.
Its latest promise on October 30th that a “revised response will be going through the sign off process” by the end of that week has so far failed to deliver any information.
As always with TfL, the presumption has to be that it has something to hide until and unless evidence emerges to prove otherwise.