Caroline Pidgeon

In an article for the Lib Dem Voice website, Caroline Pidgeon describes how anomalies in the Oyster card system result in Londoners being overcharged by £500,000 a month when they travel on National Rail services:

This week at City Hall I was accused by Boris Johnson of being a “negative Liberal Democrat” when I dared to question him over some of the problems that have happened as a result of the extension of Oyster Pay as You Go to national rail services across London.

Well I stand by my questioning of the Mayor as there is no doubt that a huge number of Londoners are not getting the best deal that Oyster could deliver. There are serious anomalies in how the system operates, and the full benefits of the technology are simply not being delivered. Most significantly many people using Oyster on the trains, whether they are Londoners or visitors, are being overcharged, sometimes by quite large amounts. This January alone it is estimated that 32,000 passengers were overcharged a total of half a million pounds.

Read the full article here.

Caroline Pidgeon, the Liberal Democrat London Assembly transport spokesperson, has revealed that each and every Londoner is now owed £5 by embassies that evade paying the Congestion Charge. For the first time ever the total unpaid bill for non-payment of Congestion Charge and Penalty Charge Notices now exceeds £40 million.

Through repeated questioning, Caroline Pidgeon has obtained figures from the Mayor showing that the amount owed by embassies soared during 2009 by more than 40%, with the unpaid bill rising by £1 million every month. At the very start of the 2010 the total unpaid bill from embassies stood at £39 million, compared to an unpaid bill of £26 million at the same time last year.

Commenting on these new figures, Caroline Pidgeon said:
"It is shameful that a minority of embassies continue to evade paying the Congestion Charge. British diplomats respect the law of other countries and it is only right that diplomats do the same in this country.

The London Assembly has called on the Mayor to persuade the Government to meet its original commitment to contribute funds to London boroughs to help them meet the costs of extending off-peak free bus travel to people who do not live in London.

A motion agreed today deplored the government's decision to halve this contribution, and urged the Mayor to put pressure on the government to abandon their U-turn and honour the agreement they originally made.

London Lib Dems have reacted angrily to news that the concessionary fares scheme in London will be cut by £29m this coming year.

It is yet another clear sign that Gordon Brown has given up on London, choosing to sacrifice capital seats for marginals elsewhere in the country.

London taxpayers have always paid for the Freedom Pass, which covers pensioner travel on all forms of transport. But when the Government introduced the national free bus scheme, they agreed to contribute to the cost and cover journeys made by tourists and neighbours.