The grant funding for operations that TfL gets fluctuates considerably from year to year - the table below shows the figures presented in the annual accounts in £million. The 2014 GLA grant figures also includes other revenue grant most (all?) comes from the GLA each year.
| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 |
DfT grant | 1634.1 | 2058.2 | 632.8 | 104.4 | 40.9 | 311.2 | 255.1 | 27.1 | 27.1 |
GLA grant from business rate retention | | | 846 | 828.5 | 772.5 | 854.3 | 1036.5 | 1704 | 913.5 |
Other revenue grant | 67.7 | 148.8 | | 132 | 28.9 | 19.6 | 50.8 | 93.8 | 89.9 |
Council tax precept | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 |
| 1707.8 | 2213 | 1484.8 | 1070.9 | 848.3 | 1191.1 | 1348.4 | 1830.9 | 1036.5 |
Thanks for that.
As you say - the amounts are not consistent - but shows a very clear shift from DfT to GLA.
It's of interest to me in the context of the usual arguments you see about "road tax" - the standard procedure is for drivers to complain about changes to roads that, say, give a bit more space to cyclists, and say that they are paying "road tax" to use the roads so which is space being given away. And then the standard answer is that there's no such thing as "road tax" - only VED and tax on fuel, neither of which directly determine the amount of funding that goes into building and maintaining the road infrastructure. And that's true, but it can always be said that drivers pay into a pot of money (central government tax) and out of that same pot, in the broadest terms, comes the money that pays for the road network, at least the trunk network.
But in London the equivalent of the "trunk network" is looked after by TfL. And it seems to me that because TfL now barely receives any grant from central government... it's quite fully uncoupled from VED and fuel tax revenue. In other words... if car drivers somehow suddenly stopped paying either of those, there would not be a direct impact on TfL's funding sources. In fact, London's "trunk" roads are effectively paid for out of a pot of money, most of which comes either from public transport farebox revenue, or from local business rates.