Sadiq Khan is covering up his fare dodging failure and Londoners are paying the price

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Sadiq Khan doesn't care about tackling low-level crime, writes the leader of the London Conservatives

If you've ever seen any clips of the London Assembly, you'll know how much Sadiq Khan likes to dodge and duck questions in an attempt to conceal the truth: that he's doing a terrible job in London.

My sympathy then goes out to Julia Lopez MP, Havering Conservatives, and my colleague on the Assembly Thomas Turrell AM, who have this week written to the Mayor to call him out for refusing to publish crucial fare dodging data.

Fare evasion is a disease: once it takes hold, it spreads and encourages further social degradation as people feel they can jump the barriers with impunity. If you get away with not paying for your transport, what else do you feel emboldened to do? Not only that, but it costs Londoners £190million a year in lost revenues, which we have to pay for in the form of fare rises.

Boris Johnson stamped it out; under his tenure as Mayor, fare evasion was as low as 1.2 per cent of journeys.

But Sadiq Khan doesn't care about tackling crime, especially low-level crime, and so under him it has tripled to 3.5 per cent of all TfL journeys being unpaid.

In the context of this, Julia Lopez, the fantastic Conservative MP for Hornchurch and Upminster, put in some FOIs to get hold of the data for herself, to help better understand the scale of the problem in Havering.

When she got no answers, Thomas Turrell AM, my colleague and the City Hall Conservatives Transport Spokesman, put in questions to the Mayor of his own.

On both occasions they were told that the data could not be published because it was not data that TfL kept. What nonsense — do you believe it? I don't.

So good on them for writing to the Mayor to call out the culture of secrecy that he has overseen at City Hall, which Neil Garratt AM, another colleague of mine, called out in his most recent report.

Sadiq's approach to transparency at City Hall would make the Soviets blush, with inconvenient data buried, if collected at all, whilst beaming press releases are pushed out to make it look like all is fine and well.

Well, we know it isn't. We know that knife crime is still a real threat, and business robbery has exploded to a level where it is now more prolific in London than it is in Chicago.

His response to Julia and Thomas better be good, for his sake, because if he won't respond and publish the data on crimes that Londoners seriously care about, he can expect the City Hall Conservatives to be hot on his case.

There is no excuse for withholding this data from the public and I say it stinks.