Request ID: FOI-0330-2324 Date published: 31 May 2023
You asked
FROM THE PERIOD OF JANUARY 2019 TO END OF APRIL 2023:
- How many complaints against members of your staff have you received about their personal social media accounts undermining public trust or confidence/committing disreputable conduct in your organisation?
- How many of these complaints included the word 'Only Fans' or referenced the member of staff having an Only Fans account?
- How many of these complaints referred to the member of staff posting sexually explicit images of themselves online?
- How many of these complaints resulted in any kind of disciplinary action?
- How many of these resulted in disciplinary hearings?
We answered
Our Ref: FOI-0330-2324
Thank you for your request received on 4 May 2023 asking for information about complaints made about staff.
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. I can confirm we do hold the information you require.
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 in excess of £450 to provide a response to your current request. This is because it is estimated that it would take over 18 working hours to retrieve and compile the information you have requested.
In order to collate the requested information we would have to manually review at all of the complaints we have logged using the code ‘inappropriate behaviour’. We do not hold a further breakdown on these cases that we could run a report on. We have logged circa 1,900 complaints as ‘inappropriate behaviour’ relating to staff during the time period requested. Please note that this figure will also include queries which cover a wide range of issues such as rudeness and observing staff/contractors smoking. However, we would need to individually review each case to determine whether they were relevant to your request. Additional time would then be needed to extract information on the outcome of any investigation and any later actions. Conducting this process would considerably exceed the cost limit. 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, by narrowing the timeframe significantly. 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.
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
