Watchdog criticises TfL over poor communication during power failure

Powys County Times

14-05-2025

Transport for London (TfL) has been criticised for poor communication after a power outage caused disruption to its train services on Monday.
Watchdog London TravelWatch (LTW) said the organisation should do 'much better' in how it provides information to passengers when things go wrong.
The Elizabeth, Bakerloo, Jubilee and Northern lines were among those disrupted on Monday afternoon after a fault on National Grid's transmission network.
Services on most of the affected lines returned to normal later in the day, TfL said.
LTW said: 'While incidents such as these are unpredictable, it was disappointing to see the lack of information and updates on TfL's own social media feeds, particularly as other train operators were keeping passengers updated.
'Increased traffic to the TfL website also saw the site crashing and becoming unresponsive.
'We accept that incidents like this can occur but do expect TfL to do much better when it comes to communicating with the millions of people who are reliant on their services.
'Directing all passengers to their website is not practical if the site then crashes, and people need to receive up-to-date information in order to continue their journeys with the least disruption.
'Passengers also need reassurance that public transport services will be more resilient in future to incidents such as this.'
Emma Strain, TfL's customer director, said: 'I apologise to our customers who were affected by the power issue caused by a failure of supply from National Grid on the network yesterday and who had any issues accessing our travel information.
'All of the rail services that were affected were restored yesterday and have been operating as normal today.
'We continue to look carefully at how we best notify customers about service issues in real time, this includes being able to use notifications in our TfL Go app to communicate with customers, and in future enabling more personalised notifications based on our customers' individual journeys.'
TFL said on Tuesday its power supply stopped without warning and it needed to ensure it was safely restarted.
The older age of assets on the Bakerloo line meant additional inspections were required before those services could resume.
TfL said it will work with National Grid and UK Power Networks to investigate the outage.
The malfunction also caused a blaze at an electrical substation in the Cunningham Place and Aberdeen Place area in Maida Vale, a London Fire Brigade (LFB) spokesman said.
Firefighters were called to the substation and brought the blaze under control, but 3m (nearly 10ft) of high voltage cabling was destroyed, LFB said.