Read about when delegates at the 2025 AGM of the RMT transport workers’ union debated a motion about free fares.
How fare-free travel could benefit transport workers
By Daniel Randall, RMT activist (personal capacity)
Delegates at the 2025 Annual General Meeting of the Rail, Maritime, and Transport workers’ union (RMT) debated a motion from the union’s Bakerloo line branch proposing RMT engage with the work of community campaigns for cheaper, or fare-free, public transport, including Fare Free London. The text of the motion is at the end of this article.
Two RMT branches, Bakerloo line and Central Line East, as well as the union’s London Transport Regional Council, had previously passed resolutions supporting Fare Free London.
The motion at the AGM was heavily defeated, showing there’s a long way to go to convince a wider layer of RMT activists that a fare-free future is possible, or even desirable.
This article responds to some of the issues raised in the discussion.
“We can’t fight for the abolition of fares without an alternative funding model in place.”
This is absolutely right.
There’s no way free transport, or even substantially reduced fares, could be implemented except as part of a total overhaul of the way transport is funded. A massive increase in funding to public transport, via progressive taxation of the rich and business, is a prerequisite for abolishing fares.
Many union policies would require huge changes to government spending policy, and a totally different taxation regime with much higher taxes on the rich, to be implemented. This doesn’t stop us from fighting for them. They’re part of our vision for a different, more equal, society.
If we can envisage, and fight for, those changes in other areas, why not for transport too?
“We have members working in revenue protection. We campaigned nationally to save ticket offices. Our on-board train-crew members check tickets and collect fares. If we demand fare-free travel, all those jobs will be under threat.”
A ticket office doesn’t have to be a point of commercial transaction. They could become permanently-staffed information points, where passengers, perhaps especially those with specific accessibility needs, know they could go for information and assistance.
Workers currently employed in revenue protection roles could transition to other frontline passenger assistance roles. RMT would rightly demand that this must happen without any detriment to staffing levels or workers’ pay and conditions.
Fare Free London wants to see more staff on public transport, including on stations and on board trains. The campaign would never support any reduction in staffing levels and will always support union action to defend workers’ jobs.
RMT fights for a just transition for our offshore oil worker members into jobs in the renewables sector. That policy requires far more comprehensive government intervention and action than transitioning revenue workers into other roles on stations or trains. If we can imagine oil rig workers becoming wind turbine workers, why can’t we imagine revenue inspectors becoming station supervisors?
Massive increases in public funding that would be required to facilitate a major reduction in fares. This means the government would have to provide regular, ongoing subsidy to ensure operation. This would make jobs more secure, not less, as it would mean transport provision was no longer subject to the market logic it’s currently forced to operate under.
“Everyone likes free stuff, but this policy is just pie-in-the-sky.”
Most people in Britain now accept it’s a good thing that services like healthcare and education are provided free at the point of use, and funded through taxation. But not so long ago, arguing for these services to be universally available and free was also deemed impossibly radical. Hospitals and schools either required patients and pupils to pay fees, or were provided as charity rather than public services.
But years of campaigning expanded the horizon of the possible, and eventually won policy reform that created a public (state) education system and the NHS.
Dismissing demands for change as impossible is exactly what the bosses do when we fight for pay increases or other basic union demands. They want us to lower our horizon and think we have to put up with everything the way it is now, or to think the best we can hope for is to stop things from getting worse.
We should reject that logic. We’re trade unionists because we believe we can fight for, and win, change.
As was also noted at the AGM, the Transport Workers Union, our American sister union which organises workers on the New York subway and bus system, supports fare-free travel. This was a key factor in their president John Samuelson’s support for Zohran Mamdani, who recently won the Democratic mayoral primary.
Let’s continue the discussion about how we want transport to be funded. Although RMT has, for now, rejected the fare-free policy, we hope we can still work together on common goals, such as opposing annual fare hikes, abolishing peak time fares, and defending reduced or free travel provision for young people, over-60s, and disabled people.
Motion debated at the RMT AGM
This AGM notes, and welcomes, the union’s recent campaigning around Trainline’s ripping off of rail passengers.
This AGM believes that accessible public transport, in both physical and financial terms, is vital both for promoting social wellbeing and for confronting the climate crisis, which requires a shift away from individual car-use to lower-emission forms of mass transit.
This AGM notes the new Labour government’s decision to scrap the £2 cap on bus fares, and the fact that fares on TfL [are due to] increase by 4.6% in March 2025, in line with an equivalent increase in national rail fares.
This AGM further notes the ongoing work of campaigns including Better Buses South Yorkshire, Better Buses for Strathclyde, Get Glasgow Moving, Fare Free London, and others, which fight for affordable or free public transport in their local areas. This AGM further notes the decision of our London Transport Regional Council, and three individual branches, to support the Fare Free London campaign.
This AGM further notes the successful experiments in the free provision of public transport in several cities around the world, including Tallinn (Estonia), Luxembourg, Kansas City, Albuquerque (New Mexico), three cities in France, multiple municipalities in Brazil, and elsewhere.
This AGM rejects the bosses’ argument that jobs in the transport sector must be tied to transport being a paid-for commodity. This is capitalist logic, which our union opposes for other sectors such as healthcare and education, arguing instead for public funding and social provision to guarantee jobs based on need, rather than the demands of the market or the bosses’ bottom line.
This AGM further notes our union’s demand for the restoration of a regular government subsidy for TfL, rejecting the former Tory government’s position that TfL must be “self-financing” and reliant on fare revenue.
This AGM further notes our union’s rulebook commitment to “work for the supersession of the capitalist system by a socialistic order of society”. This AGM believes that any socialism worth the name will involve de-commodifying essential public services, including transport.
We also note the union’s existing policy for a workers’ and passengers’ plan for public transport.
This AGM therefore resolves:
● To continue campaigning against rip-off fares, and for an expansion of physically and
financially accessible public transport
● To encourage branches and regional councils in the relevant areas to engage with the
campaigns mentioned in this motion, e.g., by inviting speakers to meetings, as part of a
discussion about how transport should be funded
