Failed revenue inspection on your TfL statement

What the charge means

Three different things get muddled together here, and only one of them has a published appeals process. Working out which you are looking at is most of the job.

• An unpaid fare. Shows on a bank statement as something like TFL.GOV.UK/CP TFL UNPAID FA. This is not a penalty at all. It is a fare that failed to collect the first time, and TfL retrying it. They will try up to three times, no more than once a day, for up to thirty days. Until it is paid you cannot travel on that card.
• A revenue inspection charge. An inspector stopped you and could not confirm the journey was paid for. A flat phone, a card the handheld would not read, an Oyster showing no touch in. TfL names this in its conditions of use and never says what it costs.
• A penalty fare. A formal notice, currently £100, reduced to £50 if you pay within 21 days. This one has a proper appeal route.

If money simply left your account with an odd label and nobody stopped you, it is almost certainly the first. If someone in a high-visibility jacket asked for your card, it is one of the other two.

Why it is usually not refundable

This is the part worth being straight about. Every other charge in this guide is the system failing to price a journey correctly, and the fix is to tell it what really happened. This one is different. It is a decision that was made about you at the time, by a person, and the route to change it is an appeal rather than a refund request.

Submitting it through the overcharge or incomplete journey form is the most common mistake, and it usually comes back rejected, because that form answers a question nobody asked.

When it is genuinely wrong

Three situations are worth pursuing.

• Your account shows a valid touch in for that journey. The reader in the inspector's hand failed, not your payment. Your journey history is the evidence.
• You were charged twice. Once by the inspection and once by the normal fare. Only one of those can be right.
• You had a valid travelcard or pass that was not read at the time but exists on your account.

In all three the argument is the same and it is a strong one: the payment existed, the check failed to see it. That is a factual dispute you can win with a screenshot.

What to do about it

1. Open your journey history for the day and find the journey in question. Screenshot it, including the touch in if there is one.
2. Find the incident number or reference the inspector gave you, if there was one.
3. Contact Transport for London and describe it as a disputed inspection, not as an overcharge. See how to contact them.
4. Attach the evidence, and say plainly what you want: the charge removed because the journey was paid for.

If what you actually received was a penalty fare notice, that is a different process and a better one, because it is the only part of this with a published appeal. You have 21 days, the appeal goes to an independent appeals service rather than to TfL, and you will need the journey start time and station plus a written explanation of why you could not show a valid ticket. Paying the reduced £50 closes the matter, so appeal first if you intend to.

For an unpaid fare or a revenue inspection charge, be aware that TfL publishes no appeals route for either. That is not a reason to accept a charge you believe is wrong, but it does mean you are asking customer services to look again rather than invoking a formal process.

The charge people mistake it for

A great many searches for this land on the wrong problem. If nobody stopped you and a charge simply looks too high, you are almost certainly looking at a missed tap out, which is refundable and takes about two minutes. If the amount appears twice on two different cards, that is card clash, which is also refundable.

Both of those are far more common than a disputed inspection, and both have a much easier path.