After years of Caroline leading the campaign for more toilets on the tube, today she joined the Mayor to introduce the long-awaited, massively delayed Transport for London (TfL) toilet feasibility study. Following the event at White Hart Lane Station, the site of one of the proposed new toilets, Caroline Russell issued the below statement:
“If I’m reading the Mayor’s feasibility report correctly, Londoners aren’t going to have a whole lot of new places to wee anytime soon.
“I do thank the Mayor and TfL for producing this meaningful picture of toilets on the tube, and am relieved to see the pledges to keep toilets free, staff full-time attendants, and a commitment to accessibility.
“Yet it’s clear the Mayor still fails to comprehend the scale and magnitude of the toilet crisis in London. His ‘big’ £3 million toilet investment is still millions shy of what my report demonstrated is needed. Constructing nine new toilets is a start, but it's far from the kind of transformative investment the millions of TfL passengers were promised. [1]
“As I told him this morning, enough of the delays: Mr. Mayor, we’ve kept our legs crossed for long enough - it’s time to start building.”
Notes to editors
[1] Transport for London quarterly performance report
Caroline has been pushing for toilet funding in every Mayoral budget since the 2020-2021 cycle. During the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, Caroline pointed out the serious public health consequences of the lack of public toilets across London.
The following summer, Caroline incorporated her work with the charity Muscular Dystrophy to again implore the Mayor to see how essential toilets are to accessibility on Lonon's transport network.
In the 2022 budget cycle, Caroline’s Green Group budget amendment tried to once more fund public toilets, this time by proposing a £10 million investment for a brand-new London toilets fund to give local councils access to money to refurbish, reopen and revitalise these essential local amenities.
The following year, Caroline’s fully costed and feasible 2023 budget amendment for new TfL toilets was mysteriously blocked by the Assembly Labour group in a shocking blow to older and disabled Londoners, new parents, and so many more travellers in need of a loo on their journeys. Seeming to understand the gravity of his party’s mistake, the TfL toilet feasibility study was first proposed by London’s Mayor following his party’s puzzling opposition to that blocked Toilet amendment.
The Mayor’s team indicated the feasibility study would be shared by June 2023, but by August that deadline had been pushed back as well.
Later that month, Caroline published the ‘Loo League Table,’ analysing the many loo ‘deserts’ across the transport network and pushing TfL to explain its failure to make use of the existing upgrade programme on the tube to provide new toilet facilities. This report followed her 2021 “Toilet Paper” report as Chair of the London Assembly Health Committee, in which the committee found 91.3 per cent of respondents to their survey do not feel toilet provision is adequate to meet their needs.
In January 2024, Caroline welcomed the Mayor's allocation of £3 million for public toilets on the TfL network in the Mayor’s budget, though urged the Mayor to commit to the full £20 million investment needed to ensure every tube stop has a safe, clean, and operable public toilet.
Building on that momentum, in February 2024 Caroline commissioned new polling from YouGov showing that 74 per cent of respondents believe that there should be more toilets on the TfL network.
Most recently, in March 2024 Caroline pressed the Mayor directly over the latest delay in his long-promised feasibility study, where the Mayor explained that while “good progress has been made” on the feasibility study, TfL now plans to “publish the full study in the summer.”
Though several weeks after summer’s end now, Caroline proudly joined the Mayor, Deputy Mayor for Transport Seb Dance, and TfL Customer Director Emma Strain at White Hart Lane station today to welcome in an era of what will, hopefully, culminate with toilets built across the TfL network.