A new travel benefit for older people has been launched in the UK. Free and concessionary local travel has been snapped up by one million people of working age and the benefit costs UK transport authorities more than £200 million a year.
Concessions for individuals aged between 60 and the state pension age of 66 are available in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London, but not in other regions of England.
However, when asked by Zag Daily in a Freedom of Information (FOI) request what steps they had taken to monitor mode shift, Transport for London (TfL), Transport Scotland and Transport for Wales (TfW) admitted they had made no effort to do so. Indeed, they could not produce any analysis of the type of journeys being made with concessionary travel and, specifically, whether the pass is being used to travel to work.
In 2023-24, the face value of free rides racked up by 382,737 Oyster 60+ card holders in Greater London was £84 million. This pass is available for those aged 60 to 65, below the state pension age of 66.
There’s a proportionately higher cost in Scotland. In 2024-25, there were 360,477 National Entitlement Card holders aged between 60 and state retirement age receiving tickets worth £90.7 million.
Wales had 148,674 card holders in February but could not provide figures on the scheme’s cost. Northern Ireland had 82,026 holders of its 60+ SmartPass.
In total, there are 973,914 concessionary travel passes in use for people of working age, above 60.
Each one of the authorities or elected governments in charge of the schemes has introduced formal targets for reducing the proportion of journeys travelled by private car. So, on the face of it, this living experiment conducted across a wide cross-section of modern Britain should be a perfect opportunity to evaluate whether giving people free travel is sufficient incentive to change their car use.
After all, people aged 60 to 65 are at a stage in life where they might be ideal candidates for disposing of a car or, at least, reducing their journeys by car and switching to other modes of transport. I myself, a London resident, disposed of the family car shortly after my 59th birthday. Two years on, with the benefit of the Oyster 60+, I’ve found little reason to buy a replacement.
The failure to analyse this benefit, especially when £200 million has been spent in providing it, is surprising: collecting data from smart tickets is easy. Had they done so, TfL and London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is also the chair of TfL, could possibly have defended themselves against protests that they were unfairly giving concessions to older workers in the search for votes.n
It is curious that environmental pressure groups and a wider alliance of academics and transport campaigners have not spotted the opportunity. If such an experiment were running in continental Europe, they would have rushed to praise it.
Take Germany’s short-lived nine-Euro rail ticket in 2022 for instance, which garnered widespread interest in the UK. This attention deepened with Germany’s travel pass successor – the 49-Euro monthly unlimited local and regional transport pass which launched the following year. So, too, when Luxembourg, with a population of 677,000, or roughly that of two London boroughs, Wandsworth and Brent, abolished fares for most domestic public transport in 2020.
Angus Hanton, Co-founder of the Intergenerational Foundation charity, who has led the criticism of travel concessions for older working people, feels so strongly that he handed the £200 in savings he made with his Oyster 60+ card back to the Treasury, requesting that the money be used to support young people instead. He told Zag that TfL and the other transport bodies have no excuse, and should be measuring the impact of the concessions. This sentiment is echoed by Michael Solomon Williams, Head of Campaigns and Silviya Barrett, Director of Policy at the Campaign for Better Transport.
John Siraut, the doyen of transport economists and until recently a Senior Director at the consultancy Jacobs, said that he suspected there might be a “cynical” explanation for the lack of curiosity in the impact of free local travel on a million people’s behaviour.
He suspects research might produce the politically awkward finding that a considerable number of journeys are made for discretionary journeys, such as leisure trips, or for well-off people commuting to, or more likely, from work. The Oyster 60+ card cannot be used before 9am on buses or the tube and before 9.30am on National Rail.
By contrast, Siraut points to past studies which show that the Freedom Pass for those beyond state retirement age (66+) has the strongest uptake amongst poorer people, and particularly older women who may not drive. It worked as intended, to help the elderly remain active and sociable. New figures for the Freedom Pass in London show that at the end of July, there were 1,133 million people who used it at a cost of £207.6 million in foregone revenue.
(Pic: Yay Images)
