Scrap the £5 deposit from the Oyster card and let poor people back on the bus.

It is important because London's buses no longer accept cash. For many people on low income having £5 locked away in a card is simply not an option. This makes it impossible for many of the people we share the city with to use public transport. This creates a class of people who are entirely unable to use the bus even when the do have the £2 fare for their journey.

The scheme seems to serve no purpose beyond providing TFL with a large amount of their service users capital in the bank. A cynic might argue that it's a social engineering device designed to keep the poorest in our society out of sight and out of mind from the everyday population, however even it is simply an oversight brought in by a committee who earn enough money to never have experienced this problem, it is a system that is not fit for purpose.

To argue that the deposit is a deposit on the card is simply nonsense. When the deposit is refunded, the card becomes a useless piece of plastic waste that cannot even be reinstated by repaying the £5 interest levy. There is no good reason whatsoever that an oyster card should not be available at any time of the day free of charge to anyone who wishes to pay the correct fair for their journey.

As an occasional rough sleeper and a person unable to claim job seeker benefits due to having no permanent address, I have on numerous occasions found myself having to cash out my card and then pay a premium on the bus simply in order to get myself to the occasional work I am able to find, and then even should I make enough tips to afford the bus, and even if I finish work during the hours where it's actually possible to purchase an oyster card, I still need to find an additional £5 over and above the fare just to get home.

This compounds poverty in numerous ways. Not only am I then forced to pay a higher fee on the train but frequently find myself unable to travel at all if my journey requires a bus. I am then forced to reflect on the long occasionally dangerous walk home, as I burn off far more of my hard earned calories than I need whilst empty buses simply pass me by, that London values my time as little as my safety and basic humanity.

A perfect illustration of how this serves as a very real and easily resolvable example of how poverty creates more poverty can be shown by the following story.

"Having cashed out my oyster card to afford the train into town to look for work, I had essentially nothing left at the end of the day.

I invested my last 1.30 on a pen. I used the pen to make street art. Enough people wanted to patronise me that I made 11.10 and something to eat. I was now delighted to find that after my days work i had enough money to restock a new pen for the following days work, put a five pound deposit on an oyster card, use the remaining money to pay my fare and have enough change to drink some water on the way home. Except i couldn't, because there was no where in the city i could purchase an oyster card.

Instead i was forced to wear out my shoes and burn all the calories i had earned wandering the streets to keep warm for the next three hours before eventually being let into the station. At this point i found there where still no facilities to purchase an oyster card, leaving me the option to spend 6.90 on a one way ticket, leaving me a valid oyster card with 4.80 credit down short of what i would have made, or spending another hour of my life waiting for the rush hour when the price of a single oyster trip would leave me exactly as poor as the the one way ticket, but with my money trapped in a transit system i no longer felt confidence in. Neither of these options felt like the best way for me to increase the odds that i could afford a regular monthly ticket in the future so i just walked onto the train through the unstaffed barriers."

TFL is there to serve all of our fellow citizens and visitors, and it is disgrace that people on the breadline are disadvantaged and dehumanised by the necessity of keeping capital that they do not posses inside TFL's bank account simply in order to gain access to the public transportation system.