Happy Birthday to TfL, who are 25 years old today.
Celebrations started in January with a panoply of posters highlighting past successes, also scattered silver roundels reminding Londoners that Every Journey Matters. But the actual birthday is today, a founding date shared with the Greater London Authority because they're 25 too.
Ken Livingstone was elected Mayor of London at the start of May 2000 but only on 3rd July did statutory powers from the Greater London Authority Act finally kick in. Ken's levers at this time were few and his budget small, but all the powers and public scrutiny we now take for granted started here.
To mark the first day a Board Meeting was held, not at City Hall because that was nowhere near ready but instead at Romney House on Marsham Street. With some inevitability that building's since been sold off as housing - to be more precise 169 flats and a health club - and I wonder if the current occupant of Room AG16 realises how historic their apartment is.
Best of all the deeper recesses of the TfL website remain firmly intact so we still have access to the Agenda and the Minutes for that inaugural meeting, and indeed of every Board meeting since.
London's transport had been centrally controlled since 1933 when the London Passenger Transport Board was formed, followed sequentially by the London Transport Executive, London Transport Board, London Transport Executive (GLC) and London Regional Transport. To the general public they were long known simply as London Transport. 25 years ago saw a switch to the more user-friendly Transport for London, a name recognising that the Mayor and Board were working on behalf of Londoners. What's interesting here is the italicisation of 'for' in the name Transport for London, this on every mention in the minutes and even in the three-letter acronym. It's always TfL, never TfL, a really powerful branding statement which at some point in the subsequent years was summarily ditched. TfL is no longer quite so for London as on the day it was born.
According to the minutes Ken Livingstone chose to become a member of the Board, his presence wasn't assumed. A striking feature of the attendance list is the inclusion of two defeated Mayoral candidates as founding Board Members. Steven Norris had been the Conservative candidate (he came 2nd) and Susan Kramer the Liberal Democrat candidate (she came 4th). It'd be unthinkable to have political opponents on the Board these days but things were a little more collegiate in those earliest days as TfL established itself. There was no place on the Board for Frank Dobson, the defeated Labour candidate.
It's clear that those present recognised this was a new dawn for London's transport, both in terms of public accountability and the potential for improving the lives of Londoners. That said there were in fact two meetings on that first day, a public one and a private one, because there will always be sensitive topics better not shared.
A lot of the first meeting was about structures and appointments, this because several formerly separate organisations had just been brought together under the TfL umbrella.
Traffic Director for London
Traffic Control Systems Unit
Public Carriage Office
Docklands Light Railway
Victoria Coach Station Ltd
Croydon Tramlink
Dial-a-Ride
Transport Trading Ltd
London Buses Ltd
London Bus Services Ltd
London River Services Ltd
London Regional Transport
The biggest omission from that list, if you look carefully, was London Underground Limited. It would be 2003 before this was finally transferred across to TfL control. The tube was held back to allow the government time to set up a public–private partnership model separating out trains and infrastructure, a PPP model they knew Ken Livingstone would vehemently oppose. This he did but it went through anyway, at least until infracos failed to deliver and by 2010 everything would be back in house.
One dull but necessary discussion point at the first Board meeting was the need for a common Health and Safety policy, another the introduction of supervisory roles within the new structure. There would be seven senior positions within Transport for London - the Chief Executive and six director posts - all appointed via a standard competitive selection process. By the end of the meeting the position of Chief Executive had been retitled 'Commissioner of Transport for London' because it sounded better, and in October New Yorker transit boss Bob Kiley was appointed in the top role.
Money was also a necessary topic, not that the new body had a lot of it. The TfL Budget for 2000/01 was based on adding up plans for predecessor bodies and totalled just £400.7m of grant funding, with zero in the reserves. By contrast TfL's budget for 2025/26 is more like £9½bn, and follows on from the organisation's first operating surplus, which just shows how much things have moved on in the last 25 years.
Fares would be a focus of the second Board meeting on July 27th. Ken took issue with the government's assumption that fares should increase 1% in real terms in January 2001, instead sticking to inflation-based rises on the tube and a fares freeze on the buses. He also expressed an aspiration to introduce a flat fare for all buses across London, rather than £1 for journeys in Zone 1 and 70p elsewhere. Meanwhile a decision was made to end the right of senior TfL staff to a company car, "with appropriate compensation in negotiation with the individuals affected".
The initial expectation was that TfL would hold ten Board meetings a year. By the second meeting that had been nudged down to a more manageable eight and these days it's just six. In the 2020s Board meetings are more a rubber-stamping opportunity than a decision-making forum, accompanied by glossy 250-page reports, but still held in public, still covering the breadth of London's transport and still with the Mayor at the helm.
From a lowly start in a Westminster meeting room to today's back-slapping celebrations, the last 25 years have seen TfL grow from a fledgling organisation still finding its feet to a world-class brand-obsessed innovator delivering better transport to millions.
It's been quite the journey, but then Every Journey Matters.
