Eight million spent on five buses whilst 800 LUL staff face losing their job.

TfL have spent £7.8 million pounds so far of a budget allocation of £15 million, to find a replacement for the Routemaster bus which was scrapped by the previous London Mayor Ken Livingstone, as it was inaccesible to many people.

This is at a time when 800 staff are being cut at LUL in a drive for ‘efficiency.’ Is it really efficient to spend nearly 8 million pounds on a prototype bus when bus industry execs are telling The Times "It is, frankly, farcical. We did not ask for the new Routemaster and I am not sure we would want them."

The majority of bendy buses have now been taken off the streets, and are already replaced with regular double decker buses. However, money is being spent on a new style Routemaster. A traditional double decker costs around £190,000. These prototypes work out at £1.6million each and when they go into mass production are said to cost ‘less than £300,000 each.” That’s £100k more per bus.

However, as the introduction of a new Routemaster bus was part of Johnson’s election promise, and it would appear, one of the most pressing things on Londoner’s minds TfL is spending millions to fulfil the need for a bus that you can easily hop onto and fall off of (unless of course you are aged / disabled / carrying shopping or luggage / scared of falling of a moving bus with no doors).

Even the Evening Standard seems to be getting bored of the saga - one they actively encouraged for months - with the headline “Boris Johnson's Routemasters branded a waste of money at £7.8m for five buses”