Request ID: FOI-0685-2324 Date published: 29 June 2023
You asked
Please provide information about the decision making to remove the left hand turn from Balham high road into Ritherdon road and plans to restore it.
We answered
Our ref: FOI-0685-2324/GH
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 4 June 2023 asking for information about the left turn into Ritherdon Road.
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 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 carried out an email search, for correspondence from 1 March 2020 to date on all emails containing “Ritherdon Road” AND “left turn” and this produced over 24,000 ‘hits’. This number will likely include duplicates, as well as emails not caught by your request. However, we would still need to manually review all of the emails identified by the search in order to extract and collate the relevant emails to answer your request.
To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to submit a request with a narrower 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.
Whilst, for the reasons outlined above, we are unable to provide ‘all information’ as requested, your concerns about this area have been passed on to the relevant team, and we can assure you that this banned turn is being reviewed and we anticipate a decision being made later this year.
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