People using Transport for London (TfL) services still have to wear a face mask, despite the government relaxing Covid-19 restrictions on Wednesday (January 20), Sadiq Khan has said.
The London mayor said that wearing a mask was still “one of the single most important and easiest things we can all do” to slow the spread of Covid-19.
TfL enforcement officers can still stop people not wearing a mask from getting on a service, but they now cannot hand out fines.
Khan said that people were more likely to wear a mask when they legally had to do so, rather than TfL just saying they could not travel without one.
The agency’s own statistics appear to support this: some 86 per cent of people claimed to wear a mask on every journey from December 12-January 8, when you could be fined for going mask-less.
That is up from 78 per cent of passengers making the same claim from September 19-October 16, when legally they did not have to wear a mask.
It came after Boris Johnson told the House of Commons on Wednesday that face masks would no longer be mandatory in public places, although people would still be advised to wear them in crowded places or when meeting strangers.
But Khan called on the government to reverse the legislation change. He said this would ensure that “the rules are clear and consistent and crucially means enforcement action can continue to be carried out on our transport network.”
The mask rule was one of several measures scrapped as part of a return to the government’s Covid ‘Plan A’, with the Prime Minister saying that the Omicron wave of the virus had peaked nationally.
Other changes included an end to work from home advice, the scrapping of mandatory Covid passes for large events and secondary school pupils no longer having to wear masks in classrooms.