Dulwich Village LTN TFL email correspondence (December 2020 - April 2021
Request ID: FOI-0575-2122 Date published: 07 July 2021
You asked
Afternoon,
Could you share any TFL correspondence discussing the Dulwich Village LTN between December 2020 - April 2021. I have seen the following FOI's and there is a gap for correspondence between Dec 2020 and April 2021. The request is for any TFL correspondence that has not already been provided in the below FOIs.
TFL FOI 2248 2021
TFL FOI 2455-2021
TFL FOI 0115-2122
thank you!
Kind regards
We answered
TfL Ref: FOI-0539-2122 and FOI-0575-2122
Thank you for your requests received by Transport for London (TfL) on 14th June 2021 and 23rd June 2021 asking for correspondence about bus delays in Southwark and Lambeth.
Your requests have been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy.
Specifically you asked the following:
Case ref FOI-0539-2122
“Please can we have an update as to TFL's internal e-mail correspondence and copies of any meeting minutes (internal TFL meetings or with other interested parties, for example but not limited to Southwark Council, Lambeth Council, Helen Hayes MP or her representatives) covering the bus delays that may be attributable to the Dulwich Village LTN. As per a previous FOIs - FOI-2248-2021 and FOI-0115-2122/GH
Clarification: any e-mails, meeting notes etc from 15th April 2021 until 14th June 2021 (or todays date if that is possible).”
Case ref FOI-0575-2122
“Could you share any TFL correspondence discussing the Dulwich Village LTN between December 2020 - April 2021. I have seen the following FOI's and there is a gap for correspondence between Dec 2020 and April 2021. The request is for any TFL correspondence that has not already been provided in the below FOIs.
TFL FOI 2248 2021
TFL FOI 2455-2021
TFL FOI 0115-2122”
I can confirm that we hold the information you require. However, your requests are being refused under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act. Under section 12, TfL is not obliged to respond to a request for information if it would cost more than £450 to determine if the information is held, and to then locate, retrieve or extract that information from elsewhere. This is calculated at a rate of £25 per hour, equivalent to 18 hours work. Note that where requests for the same or similar information are received from the same applicant within 60 consecutive working days then they can be aggregated for the purposes of calculating costs, which applies in these cases.
In looking to determine what information is held in relation to your latest requests an automated search was run of all TfL email addresses between 1/12/20 – 30/4/21 containing the phrase “Dulwich Village LTN”, which produced 1,433 hits. In order to determine which of these are and are not relevant to your request we would need to review each one individually. We do not believe this is possible within the costs limit. Furthermore, the search phrase used may not be the only phrase relevant to your request, and so the amount of material we would need to search is in all likelihood wider still if alternative phrases were used.
In order to bring your request within the costs limit you may wish to consider reframing it to narrow its scope and to focus on the information that is of most importance to you. However, note that any request asking for “any correspondence” is likely to take some time to process as there is no particularly quick or easy way of finding all such correspondence. In considering the submission of any revised request I would suggest that you first review the following page of the Information Commissioner’s website which provides advice to applicants on how best to access information from public bodies:
In particular I would draw your attention to the table of “Dos and Don’ts” found halfway down that page that includes the following guidance:
Don’t… Send ‘catch-all’ requests for information (such as ‘please provide me with everything you hold about ‘x’) when you aren’t sure what specific documents to ask for.
Don’t….Disrupt a public authority by the sheer weight of requests or the volume of information requested.
Don’t….Deliberately ‘fish’ for information by submitting a very broad or random requests in the hope it will catch something noteworthy or otherwise useful. Requests should be directed towards obtaining information on a particular issue, rather than relying on pot luck to see if anything of interest is revealed.
The application of the section 12 exemption does not affect the processing of your other open requests (case refs FOI-0574-2122 and FOI-0576-2122) which are being addressed separately and for which you will receive substantive responses by the deadlines previously advised.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely,
David Wells FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
