Follow on from FOI-0257-1920 I believe the request is fair and if too wide in scope for the current parameters outlined, the information requested may be released in part or in full along the more concise lines of: 1) Has any employee received any extension to the nature of salary and conditions cited in the original request? 2) What was the maximum length that an extension of the nature cited in the original request was given? 3) If the length of period requested is too long a duration, then perhaps the period 2014-2019 may be simpler to research?

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TfL Ref: 0643-1920

Thank you for your email received by us on 21 May 2019 asking for information about employees who have received sick pay/remuneration extended beyond their nominal contractual entitlement periods following your previous request for information (0257-1920).

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

Has any employee received any extension to the nature of salary and conditions cited in the original request? 2) What was the maximum length that an extension of the nature cited in the original request was given? 3) If the length of period requested is too long a duration, then perhaps the period 2014-2019 may be simpler to research?

Your original request asked for:

an anonymous breakdown of information and data on payments for employees who have had company sick pay/remuneration extended beyond their nominal contractual entitlement periods. This could be for any reason, usually to cover understandable elongated medical treatment lengths, etc.

Specifically 1) Has "company sick pay," or any other financial salaried remuneration ever been extended for any TFL/LU/LOROL/Any TFL subsidiary employees beyond their contractual nominal company sick pay period?

2) If so, what has been the cost to the company for such extensions (broken down by year)?

3) Can you give clear details of the lengths of these extensions (Extended by 1, 2...18+ months etc) as well as categorizing the data through the:

details of the lengths of these extensions (Extended by 1, 2...18+ months etc) as well as categorizing the data through the:

a) Ethnicity/racial profiles of said employees

b) Disability status (Disabled Vs non-disabled) of said employees (Did they fall under the current Equality act 2010 and it's constituent Acts such as the DDA 1995)

c) Age of employees

d) Sex/gender of employees

e) Religion/Faith of employees

f) Category of definition of extension via reason given (i.e -Cancer treatment etc) or as much detail as possible on the given reason for extension. (This may be more complex in which case "Complex," can be given as a reason

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.

To provide an insight into the work needed to be undertaken to fulfil your request, we can advise that employee absence is based on each individual’s rolling year starting from their first absence. Therefore we would need to know the rolling years of every employee before we could then determine if they had exceeded the six months absence period.

As on average, an all colleagues absence report can take up to six hours to run for one year, we would then need to try and formulate a new software code that connects with every employee’s record in order to establish a 12 month timeline for each person and then try and match the absence, which if one person was dedicated to work on this task, would take over a month to work on.

Our SAP HR employee reporting system does this calculation for us and since this is not manual, there is no way of overriding the pay and breaking the SAP rule that we are aware of, consequently any payments would have to be done as additional payments.

Furthermore, these additional payments are unlikely to be categorised in a manner that enables us to retrieve and formulate a response in the format requested

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 request in future, please bear in mind that the Freedom of Information Act allows you to request recorded information held by us. 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 or specific departments of the organisation.

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 do not hesitate to contact me.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.

Yours sincerely

Jasmine Howard
FOI Case Officer
Information Governance
Transport For London

 

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