London commuters charged in excess of £8m for not touching out with their bank cards

If you pay your Tube fare using contactless bank cards and failed to touch out at ticket barriers, you’ve been charged a full fare.

Since the introduction of payment through contactless bank cards in September last year, commuters have been charged a whopping £8m for not touching out.

Of the £8.374m, £5.776m still remains unclaimed by commuters.

The figures – revealed by a freedom of information request by Ben Schofield, a communications manager from Southall – showed that of the 58 million journeys using contactless cards, 1.38 million were classed as “incomplete” and customers paid full fare for it.

Schofield told the Standard: “I use contactless to visit my mother at Lee where there are no ticket gates, making it easy to forget to touch out.

“If they cannot refund all that money, TfL should give Londoners a say in how it is spent, perhaps towards travel for disabled children – anything rather than leave it sitting in TfL’s coffers.”

Lauren Sager Weinstein, head of analytics at TfL, told the Standard: “Just 2.4% of journeys using contactless are incomplete, similar to Oyster, and we work hard to remind customers to touch in and out.

“We know some customers sometimes make honest mistakes and miss touching out at the end of their journeys. We use their journey history to try and work out their likely destination and automatically refund them the difference between their actual journey fare and the maximum fare. Customers can also use their TfL online account to get a refund or contact our customer services team.”