James Ford is a political columnist for City AM and a former adviser on transport policy to Boris Johnson during his time as Mayor of London.
Sadiq Khan would very much like it if people would stop using the phrase ‘Lawless London’. It really seems to wind the little fella up. He is very keen that everyone buys into 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 delusion variously intended to talk down the metropolis, a Trumpian trope, and the result of a “dark blizzard of disinformation” online supported by Beijing and the Kremlin.
I do not want to accuse the Mayor of indulging in some very on-brand left-wing paranoia, but popular perceptions that crime in London is bad and something that the public is genuinely concerned about is not purely the confection of a cabal of Kremlin-controlled chatbots. It was not Vladimir Putin (but, rather, the Mayor’s own protection officers) who left a bag of weapons in a South London street unattended. It was not Red China that orchestrated a mob of the capital’s youth to besiege a branch of M&S in Clapham recently. And when M&S spoke out to accuse Khan of being soft on crime, it did so of its own volition, not at the behest of Donald Trump/Benjamin Netanyahu/Elon Musk (delete according to your lefty delusion of choice).
The Mayor might like to brag that he has finally started to get the annual number of murders committed in the capital down (though it is still higher than in 2014 when Boris was Mayor), but plenty of other crime stats are ominously moving in the wrong direction. Take, for example, the transport network. We are all well aware that TfL seems to be losing the battle against graffiti on Tube trains (cost to the taxpayer: £11m a year) and has all but given up on fighting fare evasion (cost to the farebox in lost revenue: £190m a year). But what about more serious offences? In 2025, sexual offences on London Underground averaged 2.6 assaults per day, the highest level for five years. It should surprise no one, therefore, that an online petition pushing for women-only carriages received 15,000 signatures last year. Things have gotten so bad for bus users that the London Youth Assembly recently called for ‘bleed kits’ be installed on high-risk bus routes to help passengers who are stabbed.
Nor is it just passengers that are suffering on a transport system that is manifestly less safe. Figures obtained by the GLA in February revealed that the number of assaults on TfL staff or contractors has doubled in the last year to about 200 a week. The scale of the violence is particularly severe on the bus network. Between October and December 2025, there were 1,324 violent incidents against bus drivers in London – a threefold increase on the same period in 2024. (Given how often Sadiq Khan likes to boast about being the son of a bus driver, he should feel a particular shame about this statistic.)
With this backdrop of anti-social behaviour, crime and public anxiety, we should not be all that surprised that TfL continues to have trouble getting passenger numbers back to pre-pandemic levels. Whilst the Elizabeth Line continues to outperform expectations, the opposite is true of the rest of the network. There were 62 million fewer bus journeys between April and December 2025 than there were in the same period in 2024. London Underground passenger numbers have missed targets and demand on the DLR is also down. (Customer satisfaction with TfL was dropping steadily under the current Mayor anyway – from 86 per cent in 2016/17 to 78 per cent in 2022/23 – producing the longest continual decline on record). In 2023/24 just 54 per cent of Londoners surveyed agreed with the statement that “TfL cares about its customers”. According to TfL surveys, in the first half of 2025, 39 per cent of passengers reported that they had felt worried whilst using the capital’s transport network. Nearly 1 in 10 Londoners said they had been deterred from using public transport (either temporarily or permanently) after experiencing a ‘worrying incident’ on the transport system. (‘Worrying incident’ seems to be TfL’s preferred euphemism for witnessing a crime or feeling scared on the transport network; and it should worry all of us that it happens so often that they have sought out a deliberate substitute term).
The planned programme of significant, sustained fare rises until the end of the decade is unlikely to improve customer attitudes or arrest the fall in passenger numbers. These fare rises are set to cost Londoners an extra £168 million every year. That is a lot extra to pay for a journey in a train festooned in graffiti, where you are more likely to get groped or see a member of staff assaulted than just a few years ago. This is not just a public safety problem (which would be bad enough) – this may well become a serious economic problem for TfL’s financial future.
The decline of London’s transport network is not an AI-generated fiction but Londoners’ every day, lived experience. These are, let us remember, TfL’s own statistics not a “dark blizzard of disinformation.” The Mayor might contest the idea that London is ‘lawless’, but he will have a hard time arguing that the Underground – indeed the public transport system more widely – has become not just more unruly but downright unsafe on his watch. The more Londoners that experience ‘worrying incidents’ when using the transport network, the more urgent it becomes that Sadiq Khan must endure a ‘negative popularity event’ of his own at the ballot box in 2028.