Don’t use your Oyster card if you want to avoid the £20 auto top-up, says TfL chief

The £20 auto top-up on pay-as-you-go Oyster cards should be reduced to £5, say watchdogs
Ross Lydall
Ross Lydall @RossLydall21 January 2021

London’s transport commissioner has advised passengers to stop using Oyster cards to avoid incurring hefty automatic top-ups during the pandemic.

Andy Byford said travellers should pay with contactless bank cards to prevent large amounts of cash being loaded on to their pay-as-you-go Oysters.

London TravelWatch, the passenger watchdog, has raised concerns that Oyster passengers are triggering the £20 automatic top-up at a time they are making few journeys and when finances are tight for millions of people.

It said this could result in a passenger using an Oyster to pay for a £1.50 bus journey ending up with an amount 13 times greater being debited from their bank account.

TravelWatch director Emma Gibson said the auto top-up facility, which doubled from £10 to £20 in 2019, should be reduced to £5.

In a letter to Mr Byford, she said: “Many transport users budget on a daily basis, meaning for some, £20 is a very large amount to hold on an Oyster card.  

“Many passengers will no longer be travelling as regularly as they might have done in the past or at peak times. This means that if using auto top-up they will be carrying a larger net balance on their card than previously.  

“With increasing levels of unemployment in and around London, and general restrictions on household budgets we think it is important that it is easy for passengers to be able to spend within their means.”  

About 27,000 Oyster cards a week are being topped up at present – but, of these, about 10,000 people make only one or two journeys a week.

Campaigners say the decision last May to stop taking cash payments at 200 of the 262 Tube stations had caused problems for people on low incomes. This week TfL said it had abandoned plans to remove cash from the remaining stations.

Mr Byford, in a reply to Ms Gibson, said it would not be possible to change the top-up amount at present due to TfL’s financial crisis.

He said: “Our recommendation to customers concerned about auto top-up values is to switch to contactless when travelling.  

“Using contactless to pay for travel directly provides all the benefits of auto top-up without the need to register or keep unused credit on their Oyster card.”

He said there had been few complaints about the increase in the minimum top-up to £20, a change that was introduced to reduce the risk of passengers not paying the correct fare on longer journeys.

Mayor Sadiq Khan, at Mayor’s question time today, said TfL was investigating the feasibility of reducing the top-up to £10. “I can see that some customers might benefit from being able to top-up less,” he said.

Tory assembly member Keith Prince, who raised the matter with the mayor, said: “If you could reduce it to £10 that would really help and probably would encourage even more people to… use Oyster cards.”

 

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