Exclusive: Sadiq admits some TfL passengers may never be refunded after cyberattack
Plus: London's private schools told to stop suggesting it's easy to attend for free; the editor of the Standard quits to spend more time in £4,000-a-night hotels.
Good morning from London Centric, where we are preparing for a classic London Christmas by running the gauntlet of brightly lit rickshaws blasting Mariah Carey at full volume as they charge tourists £100 to cycle down Regent’s Street.
It’s gearing up for party season, so prepare to reinstall the Uber app and watch as the driver circles the block before cancelling on you as the surge pricing comes on. Gather round with loved ones to watch classic Christmas films set in London that bear no resemblance to the reality of waiting on a freezing cold station platform with other December commuters. Hand over a wad of cash to a man standing outside your local pub selling Christmas trees, whose card machine is mysteriously broken.
But first, London Centric had a chat with Sadiq Khan about an issue that has been filling our inbox: When is TfL going to refund its passengers who have been left out-of-pocket after their massive cyberattack?
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Sadiq Khan has told London Centric that some of the capital’s residents may never receive the refunds they are owed by Transport for London, after a cyberattack resulted in up to a million people being overcharged for their travel.
TfL’s customer service boss separately confirmed to us that it will not actively offer refunds to Londoners, instead asking people to manually apply for a refund for each journey they were overcharged.
The mayor of London admitted that, as a result of this policy, some “people who should have had free travel” over the last three months could be left out of pocket because they “may have lost their receipt and they may not claim it back”.
A massive cyberattack hit TfL’s systems at the start of September, prompting the organisation to defensively shut down many of its services in a bid to stop criminals getting further access. Despite attempts to paint a positive picture, a London Centric investigation last month exposed the “shitshow” of the aftermath, which severely impacted young and vulnerable Londoners who were left without the discounted or free travel they rely on. An ongoing criminal investigation has resulted in the arrest of a 17-year-old male from Walsall near Birmingham.
TfL has spent the last three months urging people to keep records and receipts from their journeys so they can manually claim back any extra costs at an unknown future date – though the lack of a major public information campaign on tube trains, buses or stations, means many people are unaware of this requirement. The total sum of wrongly overcharged fares is unknown but is expected to be well into the millions of pounds, all of which TfL should never have received.
Talking to London Centric, the mayor of London confirmed that it would be “some weeks” before TfL is able to process all refunds and it is “possible” that some people may not remember to claim the refund they are entitled to. Khan added: “I’d encourage anyone who reads this piece to contact TfL directly. We are determined to make sure no one’s out of pocket because of this cyberattack.”
There are two separate groups of passengers who have been overcharged. First are the children, students, and over-60s who have been unable to apply for new discount Oyster cards until recently, leaving many of them paying substantially over the odds for travel.
Secondly, there are the passengers who have been wrongly overcharged while using contactless payments, such as when a card reader on a station gate is not working. They have not been able to use the TfL website and app to request refunds for incomplete journeys, an issue that has been going on for three months.
Emma Strain, TfL’s customer director, told London Centric she hoped self-service refunds through the organisation’s app and website would be available “very soon” and praised the work of her customer support staff in dealing with the backlog: “We’ve been saying to customers all along: Keep records of your journey… and we will support customers who have been charged more than should have been.”
She said there would not be an automatic process to refund passengers, with the onus instead on individuals to remember incomplete journeys or overcharged fares during the last three months, then apply for money back: “Once people have got access to their journey history, you’ll be able to log on and complete your journey. It’s in our interests, we want our customers to be happy and to support them. There’s no incentive for me to delay it.”
Exactly how people will reclaim three months’ of overcharged journeys remains unclear. There is also still no way for young people to access credit stranded on expired Oyster cards.
Emma Best, a Conservative member of the London Assembly, who has been scrutinising TfL bosses on the cyberattack, suggested the lack of proactive refunds is a mistake: “People aren’t going to remember the journeys they took three months ago and what they’re supposed to have been charged.”
She said TfL had failed to get a grip on the “scale and severity” of the refund issue: “TfL received that money and now we have a big job of understanding what TfL should have in revenue and what it shouldn’t. It matters if we’ve been taking more money than we shouldn’t have had.
Best pointed out there are knock-on issues left unanswered, such as how TfL will stop fraudulent claims for refunds from people, in addition to doubts over the accuracy of TfL’s revenue and passenger numbers given the amount of money that needs refunding.
She added: “People are going to be so angry when they realise they’ve been overcharged and TfL is not going to put any weight into telling them they’ve been overcharged.”
Hang on, where have all the passengers gone?
At one end of TfL’s business is the possibility that it will end up keeping large sums of money that should should have been refunded to passengers. At the other end of the business, according to a detail spotted by London Centric in TfL documents published yesterday, is a growing financial black hole.
In its own financial papers TfL has revised down its year-end financial figures by £38m, “largely due to the financial impacts of the cyber security incident”, suggesting the final cost of the incident could be enormous.
In addition, the sluggish state of the London economy means people aren’t using TfL’s services, so passenger revenue is £111m lower than expected. TfL’s assessment is that young Londoners, who are heavy users of public transport, can’t afford to travel around the capital as much due to low wages and spending all their money on high housing costs.
Dylan Jonestown Massacre.
The editor of the London Standard, the heavily lossmaking local publication co-owned by a Russian oligarch’s son and a Saudi state bank, has stepped down after just 18 months in the role.
Dylan Jones, the former boss of glossy men’s magazine GQ, is leaving the newspaper “to spend more time on writing and on his various other projects”. (As the editor of a London news outlet, I’m impressed he found the time.)
London Standard executive chairman Albert Read told staff that Jones — whose brief tenure included making half the Standard’s newsroom redundant, a collapse in its website traffic, and an attempted transformation from a daily newspaper into a weekly magazine — “has had a huge effect on our business”.
Jones will become “editor-at-large” of the newspaper from next month, in addition to being “consultant editor” at Aston Martin’s in-house corporate magazine, where he moonlighted during his Standard tenure by writing about driving expensive cars to £4,200-a-night hotels while his journalists struggled to get by.
One of Jones’ first decisions as to editor was to hire US-based media writer Michael Wolff to write a weekly column, only for the feature to be quietly dropped after a few weeks when it was clear the outlet could no longer afford his fees. Jones cut an uncomfortable figure at the paper’s sparsely-attended relaunch in September, where London Centric earned the ire of co-owner Lord Lebedev. Since then Jones has flown to Los Angeles to review a Joni Mitchell gig there for the newspaper, while also holding power to account in the capital by writing about “my life in bespoke suits”.
His departure comes just a week after he told readers the relaunch had been an "unequivocal hit" with readers, with a response "so enthusiastic" that the Standard is struggling to meet demand for print copies.
In a flurry of departures by men whose names start with J, managing editor Jack Lefley and chief commercial officer James White have also quit the Standard since the relaunch. Jack Kessler, the author of the Standard’s flagship daily newsletter, also left this week — but not before using his employer’s enormous mailing list to encourage people to follow him to his new Substack. The mood among the outlet’s remaining hard-working journalists is one of grim determination to keep going.
Correction: An earlier version of this piece conflated acerbic US media columnist Michael Wolff with the entirely blameless Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf. Apologies to both men for the error.
There is such a thing as a free education.
Exclusive: Leading London private schools have been told by the advertising regulator to stop claiming that ordinary children can attend their institutions for free.
An annual advertising campaign by a group of London establishments including Westminster School, Sir Paul's Girls' School and Harrow School, has for the last decade appeared on billboards across the Underground and TfL buses, claiming: “Top London schools. No fees.”
A London Centric reader successfully complained to the Advertising Standards Authority that the adverts, organised by a professional communications agency, are little more than a public relations campaign for private education. They argued that “very few of the schools offer full bursaries on any significant scale at all and most of the fee assistance is partial”.
The reader continued: “It gives the impression that the schools offer full fee assistance to a significant number of pupils and are actively recruiting students who cannot afford to pay. They aren't.”
The regulator agreed that the “no fees” claim was likely to break its rules on accurate advertising and asked the schools not to run it again. Instead, the adverts you’ll see on the tube now state that the schools “can be free” in some limited circumstances, with a large asterisk at the end listing the terms and conditions that would need to be met.
Lines of duty.
This week’s rebranding of the London Overground with six different names brings extra clarity to the network. Mayor of London Sadiq Khan formally unveiled the names on Thursday at Dalston Junction station alongside entrepreneur Levi Roots and singer Mica Paris.
While sifting through some documents about the plans, which were developed in conjunction with community groups and historians, London Centric noticed an interesting nugget of information: In late 2023 Khan and his team vetoed three of the original six names for unknown reasons.
Out of curiosity, London Centric filed a Freedom of Information request seeking the list of names that were rejected by the mayor’s office.
On Thursday afternoon Transport for London activated a little-used loophole to refuse the request, on the basis the rejected names would ultimately be published later this year alongside appropriate “context” which would “ensure the information is provided accurately and in an accessible manner”.
Which only makes us more intrigued: What is it about the rejected names that could be misinterpreted? And why can’t London Centric readers be trusted to work out the context themselves?
Do you have any feedback on this edition of London Centric? Leave a comment, click here to send a WhatsApp, or get in touch via email.
Have you read?
Ice cream wars and illegal gambling: How Westminster Bridge became lawless
It’s a scene that wouldn’t be out of place in Dickensian London: An overcrowded bridge across the Thames in the shadow of the great Palace of Westminster, where organised gangs run illegal gambling rackets on the pavements to scam naive out-of-towners. Bag thieves and pickpockets run among the crowds, robbing tourists within sight of MPs enjoying a drink on the terrace of parliament. Illegal street traders hawk hot nuts from stalls, while others sell dubious artworks. There are occasional acts of violence, plus the constant drone of music from unofficial buskers, tormenting the business people and workers in parliament or St Thomas’ hospital with the sound of bagpipes.
"An utter shitshow": Inside the Transport for London cyberattack
It’s almost two months since Transport for London’s systems were hacked and many Londoners are still experiencing major disruption to their lives as a result. Although operational systems were largely unaffected by the cyberattack, meaning tube and bus services have continued to run, one senior TfL executive told London Centric that behind the scenes it has been “an utter shitshow”.
Another excellent issue. I particularly enjoyed the salty tone running through The Standard piece.
The rickshaws are multiplying, they’re a genuine menace outside theatres at kicking out time when 10+ of them congregate and block the exits!