Admin fee for TfL investigation?

[GreOinStar]

I wasn’t sure where to put this, apologies if it is the wrong forum.

Is there a “standard” admin fee that TfL would add when offering someone an out of court settlement for investigating a ticketing issue? I’ve seen mention of £80-£90 when browsing this forum for train companies, but wondered if this is true for TfL as well?

 

[Fawkes Cat]

We have very little information on this, in that TfL rarely offer out of court settlements: we have seen some, but not (I think) enough to draw a conclusion on what they charge as an admin fee.

But the admin fee from any given company is likely to be standard: it will (to my mind at least) reflect a couple of things
- how much on average it costs a company to investigate a problem: why on average? Because to work it out precisely would itself be expensive - and who at work likes filling in work monitoring systems (Day 1 'Investigating Mx Z's suspected fare-dodging: 90 minutes', day 5 'Considering Mx Z's reply to our letter: 20 minutes' etc.) even if it would allow the employer to recover their costs?
- an element of punishment: given that the fee is dressed up as an 'admin fee' this can't be too big, otherwise people will start asking difficult questions about how the admin can possibly have cost that much, but any transport operator has an interest in discouraging people from fare-dodging - and making it painful to get caught is one way to discourage it.

 

[WesternLancer]

I wasn’t sure where to put this, apologies if it is the wrong forum.

Is there a “standard” admin fee that TfL would add when offering someone an out of court settlement for investigating a ticketing issue? I’ve seen mention of £80-£90 when browsing this forum for train companies, but wondered if this is true for TfL as well?

The info on this forum suggests that TfL never offered settlements, however, recently that seems to have changed as we have seen cases on here over the last few (maybe 6) months where TfL do seem to have settled out of court. Not sure if there have been enough of them, with breakdowns, to be able to say how much of the settlement costs were the admin charge element of it.

 

[GreOinStar]

Thank you both for your replies.