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City workers slowly beginning to return to office after lockdown

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Transport for London (TfL) is facing a funding gap of up to £2bn every year as a result of Covid-19, a new report has found.
TfL's finances have collapsed this year as the pandemic has forced commuters off the network.

Commuters are slowly starting to return to London’s business districts after the coronavirus lockdowns, new data from Transport for London has shown.

As of last Friday, 17,852 passengers entered and exited Bank tube station in the City, ten times more than the 1,800 who did so at the height of the pandemic.

The figure is still considerably down on pre-pandemic levels, but has shown a steady increase since the lockdowns ended in June.

At the end of February, before the pandemic struck, there were roughly 150,000 people tapping in and out of the station every day.

On the same day at Canary Wharf station, there were 24,976 people who entered and exited the station, once again a vast increase on April, when the figure stood at 4,500.

By comparison, the station saw an average 128,000 people tapping in and out of the station every day.

At Liverpool Street meanwhile, numbers are now nearly a quarter of pre-pandemic levels, with 46,396 tap ins and outs recorded on Friday.

Over the course of the lockdown, this figure had dropped from around 200,000 a day to just 5,000 in April as employees switched to full-time home working.

Across the City as a whole, a combined 166,808 people entered and exited stations on the last day before the Bank Holiday weekend. Before the lockdown, the average daily figure stood just below 1m. 

Although the figures are still a fraction of their pre-lockdown levels, the steady increase will provide some confidence for a government set on getting workers back to their offices.

Across the capital as a whole, the number of TfL users is also beginning to grow, with 1.24m people making Tube journeys on Friday.

This is roughly six times higher than in April, where London’s underground network was seeing just 200,000 passengers a day as people were warned not to travel except to make essential journeys.

The increase is even more pronounced in the West End, London’s shopping district, which saw 69,819 people tap in and out last Friday, nearly a third of February’s levels.