You will be aware that as a joint sponsor of Crossrail, Tfl and the Department for Transport commissioned Jacobs to produce a review into Crossrail's Master Operational Handover Schedule (MOHS) Could you please send me any correspondence sent or received by members of the TfL board, and also Tfl's CFO Simon Kilonback, between January and July 2018 (inclusive) that make reference to Jacobs or the Jacobs review? As you will be aware, the ICO considers official information held in private email accounts to fall under FOI, and as such I would expect this to include any correspondence sent and received from private emails as well.

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Our Ref:         FOI-0377-1920

Thank you for your request received on 6 May 2019 asking for correspondence regarding the Jacobs Review on Crossrail.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and TfL’s information access policy. I can confirm we hold some of 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 over 18 working hours to retrieve and compile the information you have requested.

When requests for email correspondence are received the FOI Case Management team may use a search tool called Discovery Accelerator. This allows us to conduct company wide email searches using keywords, dates and email addresses. The more specific a requester can be as to what they are looking for, the more we can narrow the search and therefore stand a better chance of a more relevant or focused result. A search will then return an amount of ‘hits’ which potentially contain information relating to the search terms used. Each ‘hit’ is a single email, although that email will often consist of a chain of emails containing the search term at least once.

TfL Board members do not use a TfL email address but we have carried out a pan-TfL search on all emails held that have been sent to/from any TfL staff to the email addresses that we hold for Board members between the requested period, January and July 2018 inclusive, using a keyword of ‘Jacobs’. We have also done a search for all of Simon Kilonback’s emails using these parameters. These searches have returned a total of 540 hits. It is likely that this number will include duplicates as well as emails that are not caught by the request. However, we would still need to manually review all of the emails identified by the search in order to extract and collate the relevant emails.

You have also asked for correspondence held in private email accounts. Therefore, in addition to the time taken to review the emails our searches have identified, we would also need to identify and contact each Board member who served during the time requested to retrieve any potentially relevant emails that they hold. We would then need to review these emails, including having to determine whether the information was held on behalf of TfL or in another capacity.

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. In order to refine your request you may wish to include the names of specific Board members on which to search and/or identify additional keywords to help identify those emails which are of interest.

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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