Under the FOI Act, please send me any emails sent or received by the email address below which concern the Garden Bridge project and/or the engineering firm Arup: [email protected] Should the volume of emails be too high to comply with this request on the grounds of reasonable costs, please limit the request to the following time frames: • 1 Jan 2013 – 31 July 2013 • 1 October 2015 – 1 March 2016

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Our Ref:         FOI-0110-1920

Thank you for your request received on 10 April 2019 asking for emails concerning the Garden Bridge Project and/or the engineering firm Arup.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy. I can confirm we do hold the information you require.

Unfortunately, to provide the information you have requested would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

Under section 12 of the FOI Act, we are not obliged to comply with a request if we estimate that the cost of determining whether we hold the information, locating and retrieving it and extracting it from other information would exceed the appropriate limit. This is calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described.

We have estimated that it would cost over £450 to provide a response to your current request. This is because it is estimated that it would take in excess of 18 working hours to retrieve and compile the information you have requested.

We have carried out a series of searches on Richard De Cani’s account as requested, for all emails containing the keywords “Garden Bridge” and/or “Arup” and the results against each timeframe can be seen below. To provide the requested information, we would need to manually review each of these results and consider whether the content sufficiently meets the requirements of your request and collate accordingly. For such a significant volume of emails this process would exceed the cost limit outlined above. Please also note that the Garden Bridge has also been referred to as the ‘Temple to South Bank footbridge’ and conversationally as simply “GB” so the results below are only indicative of the number of emails we hold as the searches would need to be widened in order to properly capture everything:

• All emails: 22,539 hits
• 1 Jan 2013 – 31 July 2013: 1,731 hits
• 1 October 2015 – 1 March 2016: 2,908 hits

Please note that a large volume of the emails captured in the above searches will have already been disclosed to you in previous requests as outlined below:

FOI-2029-1617 – Under the FOI Act please send me any written correspondence between engineering firm Arup and Richard de Cani in the time period covering the last six months of 2012 until Mr de Cani left TfL in 2016 which concerns and/or mentions the proposed Garden Bridge project.

Please include text messages as well as emails sent from or received by private email accounts operated by Mr de Cani.

331 pages of emails were disclosed.

FOI-1006-1819 – Under FOI, please send me any written correspondence between TfL and the Garden Bridge Trust between the following dates in 2016: Jan 27 - Feb 10
Please include only correspondence directly sent by or received by the following individuals at TfL:

Richard de Cani
Andy Brown
Mike Brown

Please exclude emails sent from third parties to the Garden Bridge Trust in which TfL were copied into and please avoid manually reviewing these.

202 pages of emails were disclosed.

FOI-1131-1718 - Under the FOI Act please send me any written correspondence between engineering firm Arup and Richard de Cani in the time period covering the last six months of 2012 until Mr de Cani left TfL in 2016 which concerns and/or mentions the proposed Garden Bridge project and that Mr de Cani was merely copied into (I have already received direct emails between him and Arup under FOI from TfL earlier in the year).

133 pages of emails were disclosed.

FOI-2716-1516 - Under the Freedom of Information Act, please provide me with all email correspondence on the subject of the Garden Bridge (or Temple to South Bank footbridge) sent by Richard De Cani or received by Richard De Cani between May 11th 2012 and March 8th 2013 which involved any of the following individuals:

- Boris Johnson
- Edward Lister
- Isabel Dedring
- Peter Hendy
- Michele Dix

86 pages of emails were disclosed.

To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider narrowing its scope so that we can more easily locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking. For example, if there is a specific area of interest relating to the Garden Bridge or Arup then we can do further searches if you were to narrow the focus.

If you want to refine your request or make a Freedom of Information Act request in future, please bear in mind that the Freedom of Information Act allows you to request recorded information held by Transport for London. You should identify the information that you want as clearly and concisely as you can, specifying the types of document that you are looking for. You might also consider limiting your request to a particular period of time, geographical area or specific departments of TfL.

Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, TfL does not have to answer your question if it would require the creation of new information or the provision of a judgement, explanation, advice or opinion that was not already recorded at the time of your request.

Please note that we will not be taking further action until we receive your revised request.

In the meantime, if you have any queries or would like to discuss your request, please feel free to contact me.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Gemma Jacob
Senior FOI Case Officer
FOI Case Management Team
General Counsel
Transport for London

[email protected]

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