Request ID: FOI-0459-2122 Date published: 28 June 2021
You asked
From 15th January 2020, presumably in response to safety concerns to passengers and vehicles over the deteriorating road surface, TfL contractors Metroline West and Abellio London ceased to serve the bus stops outside West Drayton station.
You are requested to provide the following:
Relevant correspondence with Network Rail, and London Borough of Hillingdon from 1st December 2019 to 15th January 2020 in respect of this intended closure to buses.
We answered
TfL Ref: FOI-0459-2122
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 3 June 2021, asking for information about the closure of Station Approach bus stop.
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 still considerably exceed the cost limit to provide a response to your current request because we have no way of directly reporting on this. We ran a search for emails in which @Hillingdon.gov.uk and/or @networkrail.co.uk are either a sender of recipient between 1/12/19 and 15/1/20 with the keyword “bus stop” and this produced thousands of results.
This excessive volume of information would require comprehensive review. Each email caught by the search would need to be manually reviewed to determine whether it’s concerning the closure of the bus stop. Many of the results would likely to be not relevant, duplicates, due to emails being repeated within email chains. Whilst the actual number of emails covered by your request might be a sub-set of the numbers the email search captured, it is the excessive work involved in having to locate and extract those that are relevant and meet your request, that would be very burdensome. Furthermore there are likely to be additional emails relevant to your request that may not have been caught by the keyword searches and so we would likely need to conduct further searches using additional keywords.
Unfortunately, the member of staff who was involved in this work has now left TfL. We ran the same search on his email account which produced approximately 40 emails. We have reviewed them but none were relevant to the closure of the bus stop in question.
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. 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 shorter period of time or specific departments of TfL.
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 do not hesitate to contact me.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Eva Hextall FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
