Fares Fair

Fares Fair was a public policy advocated by the Labour Party administration of the Greater London Council (GLC), then led by Ken Livingstone.

[2] The legality of the Fares Fair policy was subsequently challenged by Dennis Barkway, Conservative leader of the Bromley London Borough Council.

The 1979 Conservative manifesto had stated that "Any future government which sets out honestly to reduce inflation and taxation will have to make substantial economies, and there should be no doubt about our intention to do so."

The party had also stated that it did not want to implement unpopular spending cuts to the National Health Service, social security and defence, and so the funding cuts instead fell primarily on housing, education and social services, programmes which were primarily provided not by central government but by local authorities.

Central to Heseltine's reforms was the Grant Related Expenditure Assessment (GREA), an educated estimate of how much each individual council had to spend to provide an average standard of service.

Late in 1981, the conservative Bromley Council under the leadership of Dennis Barkway instigated a legal challenge of the "fares fair" policy in the courts.

In addition, Bromley Council initiated a legal challenge against London Transport itself, saying that it had no right to reduce its fares on the back of such an unlawful subsidy scheme.