Sir Sadiq Khan is avoiding cleaning up graffiti on the London Underground as it will help him get more money from central Government, TfL insiders have alleged.
Sources at Transport for London (TfL), have claimed that the graffiti-covered carriages on London’s Bakerloo line are assisting the London Mayor with his goal of receiving a multi-million pound Government handout for new trains.
Speaking of Sir Sadiq’s alleged deliberate avoidance of the vandalism, an insider is said to have told The Daily Telegraph: ‘Anything that helps make the case for new trains is going to be helpful.
‘We would rather the graffiti wasn’t happening, obviously. But if this is going to help, we want to replace them and need we need money from the Government to do it’.
It comes after shocking video footage posted online showed fed-up commuters taking matters in their own hands and cleaning up the graffiti.
Joe Reeve, 28, founder of policy group Looking for Growth, led the clean up effort, insisted he was ‘doing what Sadiq Khant’ after TfL reported a ‘significant increase’ in the number of graffiti incidents on its trains.
Now, it has been alleged that Sir Sadiq is avoiding the removal of the vandalism in a bid to boost his political goals. The London Mayor is currently lobbying the Government to fund a replacement of the Bakerloo Line’s 1970s rolling stock with new trains.
Sir Sadiq, chair of TfL, has also called for an extension of the line to Lewisham, south-east London. However, concerns have been raised about a lack of funds for the historic line – with its extension and reconstruction previously estimated at a cost of between £5million and £8million.
Keith Prince, transport spokesperson for the City Hall Conservatives, described the assertion that the graffiti has not yet been removed due to a lack of Government funding as ‘nonsense’.
Calling on Sir Sadiq to solve the growing issue, he told The Daily Telegraph: ‘Pull the other one, Sadiq, and actually use your powers as TFL chair to solve this blight’.
Susan Hall, leader of the City Hall Conservative Group, previously told MailOnline that Mr Reeve and his team of ‘activists’ had ‘put Khan and TfL to shame by showing how easy it is to clean up our Tube’.
She added: ‘It’s disappointing that the Mayor constantly has to be humiliated into acting, but we look forward to legions of TfL staff being put to good use wiping down the remaining graffiti which has adorned Tube carriages for disgracefully too long.’
Meanwhile, Mr Reeve, who lives in Lambeth, South London, described feeling ‘pretty frustrated’ with Sir Sadiq given the extent of graffiti seen across the line.
Speaking to the The Standard, he added that three train drivers have thanked the group for their efforts, with one telling them: ‘At least someone’s doing something’.
He said: ‘I take the Bakerloo line every morning and I see someone push past the barrier.
‘Then when I get down to the Tube, every single carriage is full of graffiti. It feels like no one is doing anything to make the city better. I’m pretty patriotic.
‘I love London, and I think it should be the best city in the world. I had the option to move to the US for work, but I want to stay in the UK and see it get better.’
The viral footage of the activists came after Neil O’Brien, Conservative MP for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston, tweeted last month: ‘Mad what Khan has allowed to happen to the Bakerloo Line — looks like 70s New York.’
While trains were previously taken out of daily service by TfL to remove graffiti, they are now cleaned overnight when the network is not running.
TfL claims that it works to remove graffiti as quickly as possible – but where it cannot be removed easily, it is covered if possible and cleaned during engineering hours.
The aim is to keep trains out on the network and minimise passenger delays.
In 2021, Sir Sadiq released a set of throwback images showing the sorry state of the tube network in previous decades, warning that without urgent Government investment the transport network could see significant cuts.
Calling on the UK Government to invest in London’s public transport, the London Mayor added: ‘Unless the Government provides the long-term funding needed to maintain our public transport network, there will be no choice but to make significant cuts to services just as demand is growing again.
‘This would mean fewer, less frequent and more run-down bus and tube services for Londoners, making it more difficult to travel around the city’.
A TFL spokesperson said that it was ‘completely untrue to suggest that any graffiti is left for longer than necessary for any reason’.
Adding that the body are ‘removing graffiti from the Tube network as fast as possible’, they said: ‘We have deployed an accelerated cleaning programme in response to the specific increase in graffiti on the Central and Bakerloo lines.
‘Teams are removing graffiti 24/7, and are currently removing more than 1,000 tags per week on the Bakerloo line and more than 2,000 on the Central line.