London Underground graffiti crackdown costing up to £11m

Up to £11m is being spent annually on cracking down on Tube train graffiti, Transport for London (TfL) commissioner Andy Lord has said.

Mr Lord said they had seen a “spike” in Tube carriages being tagged, particularly on the Bakerloo and Central lines.

In response to a Freedom of Information request, TfL last month said staff were tirelessly working to remove “one tag on average every three minutes”.

Mr Lord told the London Assembly budget and performance Committee: “We’re spending between £10m and £11m on a combination of proactive investigation and prevention, as well as cleaning.”

He added: “We’re working very closely with the British Transport Police and our own investigation teams to identify and prevent particularly the hotspot locations where people are gaining access to the trains.”

In the summer, it emerged that cleaners were removing more than 3,000 tags on Tube trains every week.

Speaking in July, Mr Lord said TfL’s enforcement teams photographed the tags before cleaning them off, in order to follow through with prosecutions, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

He urged the public not to take cleaning trains into their own hands, and said guerrilla cleaners could “put themselves at risk and cause inadvertent damage as well”.

Mr Lord added that the vast majority of affected trains were cleaned when they were not in service, but noted some were done internally while running.