How many complaints have TfL received about pornography being viewed by passengers and staff on the network in the past 12 months? How many times have members of staff been disciplined for viewing pornography? Please give details, ie where and when the offence took place and what the outcome of any disciplinary proceedings was.

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Our Ref:         FOI-0397-1920

Thank you for your request received on 8 May 2019 asking for information about customers or staff viewing pornography.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy. 

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.

We would have to review all of the complaints received in the past 12 months to determine whether they were captured by your request. We are not able to filter on whether the complaints are about passengers or staff watching pornography as this is not a category we use to code complaints. We have done an initial search using the keyword of ‘porn’, but have not identified any cases relating to our staff or customers viewing pornographic material. Similarly, with staff disciplinary cases, we are not able to filter cases by this specific issue. We would therefore have to review the details of over 250 disciplinary cases for the past 12 months to identify any that were captured by your request.

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. 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, we do 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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