London TravelWatch has ranked the capital’s transport providers according to their approach to improving personal security for passengers.
This follows research to look at what providers say they are doing to improve things like incident reporting, staff training, better on-board / at-station CCTV coverage and retention, as well as building proactive campaigns to increase awareness around tackling sexual harassment and hate crime incidents.
The scorecard results suggest that many transport providers take personal security very seriously. This comes after London TravelWatch lobbied transport companies to improve how they deal with personal security issues, based on a report at the end of 2022 which showed that:
- nearly one in four women had experienced unwanted sexual behaviour in the previous three years
- women, older people, Disabled people, the LGBT+ community and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people who use transport were at greater risk of victimisation, whether it was hate crime or sexual harassment
- 55% of respondents felt it is neither safe nor straightforward to report a crime on public transport
- 63% of people would feel more confident in responding to a crime if they had more information about how to help
Although the scorecard results suggest that measures are being taken on many of these issues, the transport watchdog for London believes providers should not get complacent and must continue to do more to make travelling safer. Success will only be truly achieved when the number of incidents and passengers’ perception of safety materially improve.
London TravelWatch is now calling on industry to work together and share best practice to ensure consistency of approach across different modes of transport (bus, Tube, Overground, DLR, rail) and at stations.
***Some transport providers featured in the scorecard serve well in excess of 50 stations in London, while others serve far fewer (with the majority of their stations being outside of the London TravelWatch zone). The scoring is not weighted or adjusted for the number of stations each company serves.
***The rankings in the scorecard are based on an assessment by London TravelWatch of the questionnaire responses sent back by transport providers, but which have not been subject to independent verification or auditing.
