Please provide a breakdown of staff grievances reported in the past three years, please provide the nature of the grievance and the outcome and, if held and retrievable within the statutory cost limit, the business area of the staff member making the complaint (Surface, rail, etc).

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Our ref: FOI-0685-1819/GH

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 14 June 2018 asking for information about staff grievances. I am sorry for the delay in replying.

Your request has been considered under the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and our information access policy. I can confirm that we do hold some of the information you require.

TfL aims to ensure positive working relationships between all employees and encourages a work environment whereby any problems or issues can be addressed and resolved as part of the normal working practice. However, when this is not possible, there are procedures to help resolve grievances as quickly as possible with consistency and fairness.

The detailed information on staff grievances that you have requested is only held from 2016 onwards. We therefore looked at the two year period June 2016 – June 2018 and details of the number of grievances by business area are provided below:

Business Area	Total No of Grievances (June 2016 – June 2018
London Underground	417
Surface Transport	66
Professional Services	67
Overall	550

Whilst we can advise you that we have recorded 550 staff grievances for this period, an error with our system is currently preventing us from reporting on the nature or outcome for many of these.

We are working to understand and rectify this problem, but in the meantime the only way to provide you with these details would be to go through each set of case notes individually, which 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 requests 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. We estimate it would take approximately 5 minutes per case just to determine the cases without a reason recorded, additional time would then be required to determine unknown case outcomes. This would therefore exceed 18 hours which, at £25 per hour (the rate stipulated by the Regulations), exceeds the ‘appropriate limit’.

If this is not the information you are looking for please do not hesitate to contact me.

If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Graham Hurt

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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