London’s local councils are to carry out a review of the capital’s Freedom Pass, because of the strain that the cost of providing free travel to over-60s is placing on budgets.
Under pressure: free journeys by the over 66s is costing councils in London £372m a year
The Freedom Pass is paid for by Croydon and the other 31 London boroughs and the City of London Corporation out of parking permit fees and traffic fines, but in the next financial year, 2026-2027, its cost will hit £372million – up by almost 12%.
The Freedom Pass provides free travel on all Transport for London services and national rail services within Greater London (except during the morning rush hour).
The London Standard is reporting today: “London Councils, which administers the Freedom Pass on behalf of the 33 boroughs, is to carry out a review of the scheme and gather evidence for the likely impact of potential changes.
“Options could include increasing the age at which Londoners receive the Freedom Pass, making it means-tested or excluding national rail services within Greater London.”
Close to 100,000 people in Croydon are aged 60 or over, and so qualify for TfL’s 60+ Oyster card before they “graduate”, at 66 (state pension age), for the Freedom Pass.
More than 1.2million Londoners have Freedom Passes, where the cost of each journey is effectively paid by the borough in which each journey starts. London Councils has estimated that they will be paying for 279million journeys from April – 221million on the buses and 44.7million on the Tube.
The Standard says that the steep rise in cost of the Freedom Pass this year is due to the inflation-busting fare rises this year.
“It’s costing more than boroughs can afford,” Stephen Boon, chief operating officer at London Councils, told the Standard.
Boon said the Freedom Pass was a “more generous” travel benefit than that enjoyed by pensioners in the rest of the country.
“It’s more than a bus pass, which is what it is in the rest of the country.”
Removing the free train travel would reduce the Freedom Pass’s cost by £150million per year, according to Boon. But that move would require a change to an Act of Parliament: the Greater London Authority Act specifies that the Freedom Pass must include all TfL transport modes.
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This is a benefit that keeps the poorest mobile and reduces traffic. At 66 I have a Freedom Pass and use it frequently in place of driving. Take it away and I’ll use the car and, like many others I suspect, will review the actual benefit of living in the capital and, more importantly, consider taking our spending elsewhere. To assume that the same number of trips would be made and the cost recouped is wildly optimistic and for many would confine people into their homes.
The Freedom Pass is a jewel in the crown of Greater London’s transport. It gives mobility to thousands of older and/or disabled people. It also reduces use of private motor cars and therefore benefits all.
No changes to the present scheme are acceptable in my view. It is not the elderly and disabled residents of London who have caused the financial problems of London councils.
Removing the national rail part of the scheme would hit us disproportionately in Croydon as we have no TfL tube services in the borough.
Overground. Estate agents and the Sadvertiser were creaming their jeans about “the Tube coming to Croydon” when they painted TfL roundels on West Croydon station and gave us the thrill of an all-stations train to Whitechapel.
Agreed, though the London Overground is not technically part of the Tube system.
That bit of the Overground is an extension of what was the East London line. The track linking the Tube to the National rail line was there for years but not used.
It’s interesting that the snobs changed Surrey Docks to Surrey Quays!
Not snobs. Property developers, who doubtless added a few thousands to the price of their shoebox homes for the cache of the “Quays”
It’s not the fault of over sixties that Croydon Council is run by inept officials that couldn’t run a p… up in a brewey! There would be plenty of money if the councils managed their finances prpperly. Once again the elderly are being made scapegoats for mismanagement and corruption. Start running Croydon Council properly and there would be plenty of money to go round!
I had thought that the Over 60 Oyster card (Semi-Freedom pass) would be withdrawn just before I got to qualify, but I got mine in September 2025. It has an expiry date in Sep 2032, so perhaps the qualifying age for the (proper) Freedom Pass is moving to 67 some time(?). It is nice to know that the steps needed to remove/change the Freedom Pass rules are so onerous !
Yes the freedom pass is tied to state pension age, which is rising to 67.
The West Midland Travel Pass covers buses, National Rail and West Midlands Metro for over 66
As an over 60’s person: I would no longer use the tube, maninline or buses without the freedom pass we need to support, mass transit for the elderly people in London. Do not remove the freedom pass.
It has been impossible to get a disabled persons freedom pass in Croydon for a while now. They literally ignore the applications.
its origins lie in being issued at pension age.. why cant it go back to that?.. pension age isn’t 60 and hasn’t been for years ..Pensioners spend money in the economy and might cut down if their travel is restricted, reducing their mental health and putting extra strain on the NHS services.
Why not adopt the same system as holders of equivalent travel passes in Manchester, West Midlands and other big cities that enjoy similarities as London Freedom Pass but they pay £10/a. And you can bet your life a large chunk of Croydon’s contribution is going to that Lizzy line and other Tube Lines which a few boroughs don’t have.
London Councils is Labour dominated, and most London boroughs are Labour controlled. That Labour is carrying on the Conservative’s austerity policy, putting private profit before public service, is one of the many reasons that they are doing so badly in public opinion polls. A collapse of their power in the May elections would teach them a valuable lesson
We live in a world of electronic near field communication cards that provide huge amounts of data to the sophisticated algorithmic pattern detection technology that I would guess is showing such concessions are being used to travel to work rather than being used as originally intended as a concession for those who required assistance with mobility due to age and infirmity.
Mr Johnson introduced the over 60 oyster card to bridge the gap created by increasing the pension ages. This free unfunded giveaway clearly made him electorally popular and it seems clear from the responses on here that it will be electoral suicide if the freedom passes are removed. However along with the budgetary constraints I’ve noticed the severe pressure placed on the travel infastructure during busy periods of travel and it is clear that some measures will be needed to control demand as supply of such a service cannot be increased without huge amounts of public investment.
The normal form of rationing is to increase prices, but this is irrelevant if there is a concession for free travel. With the sophisticated technology that NFC provides my guess that some attempt will be made to ration access to National Rail services and this can be done with a card based system. So my guess is that some limitation to services will be introduced by the number of times a week that they can be used on certain routes or exclusions applied during rush hours or other identifiable periods of excess demand.
Know this is unpopular, but it is a nonsense that free travel is being provided to people who are earning very good money and are simply not contributing to the upkeep of public transport systems.
I don’t drive, so the 60+ Oyster Card was the best 60th birthday present I could imagine, but I did bump into Kathy Bee, the then Croydon Council Cabinet Member for Transport, while waiting at a bus stop some years ago and remember her telling me then that the pass was one of the biggest items of council expenditure, so I have been afraid that there would be problems in providing it in future. It would be interesting to know how many hundreds it costs each council tax payer. She also said that the original reason for creating it was to improve the health of retired people by encouraging them to take more exercise.
It seems to me that some restrictions, such as making it unavailable to those in full-time employment, would not be unreasonable. I also think that charging a little more for it would deter those who apply for one and never use it (I personally know several) while retaining its appeal for those who need it.
If they can afford to pay millions in payouts to failed and underperforming employees (Jo Negreedy, Katherine Kerswell x 2 and Adam Wilkinson is well over a million right there), £726 per hour for a low level HR person, massively inflated pension contributions and for employees to work two Council jobs for two years with no one noticing then they can afford a benefit for older people, many of whom will have contributed for decades.
If you want to conflate everything with everything else you can end up believing that Donald Trump is a reasonable man if you want.
Well said! But conflation is the essence of journalism. Or so I was taught
Never heard of ‘Steven Boon’ before, but I wonder if we can afford him? After all we pay his employers £300,000 a year. For what, I hear you ask? Steven Boon himself appears to be paid £130,000 a year to lecture us on the Freedom Pass.
To remove rail travel from the Freedom Pass would discriminate against pensioners living in those parts of outer London – including Croydon and Sutton – who cannot get around London just by using buses and tubes.
Parliament – in which Labour has an overwhelming majority of MPs – would need to change the law if the Freedom Pass is to exclude national rail services in future. It cannot otherwise happen.
Of course, Sadiq Khan has never relied on the votes of older people in the outer boroughs and Labour are already marginalised in many of the outer boroughs, including Sutton. But in those parts of outer London where they do still have aspirations of winning – including Croydon – this would be devastating for them.