TfL Ref: FOI-0692-1718

Thank you for your email received by us on 20 June 2017 asking for information about instances of verbal abuse.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. I can confirm we do hold the information you require.

TfL takes workplace violence extremely seriously and we always encourage staff to report any instance of abuse whether physical or non physical so that preventative measures can be taken, and the strongest penalties taken against offenders. TfL has staff dedicated to workplace violence reduction embedded or working alongside the Metropolitan Police Service and the British Transport Police.  These special units were established to investigate physical assault and verbal aggression on staff, public order offences and hate crimes, amongst other offences.  These units have significantly improved the quality of staff assault investigation, as well as victim care and support. 

The London Underground Unit offers additional services to the British Transport Police in gathering evidence to prosecute offenders, working with staff and managers to help reduce the instances of workplace violence across the network and in providing additional support to those staff who may have to give evidence in court.  Over the past five years more than 1,300 people have been prosecuted for such offences and a further 180 dealt with by different means (usually a police caution).  We have also prosecuted offenders for other crimes against our staff such as disorderly conduct (causing harassment, alarm and distress) and unacceptable behaviour (by-law offences). 

However, to provide the specific 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.

In order to provide the information you have requested, we would need to manually inspect our records to determine whether they relate to any of the specific categories you have mentioned. We do not have a recording classification that would allow us to report on specific instances of abuse and so the only way to locate, retrieve and collate this information would be to go through each record individually and tally accordingly. Therefore, we are unable to provide an answer to this within the cost limit.

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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. For example you may wish to focus on a more narrowed period of time and/or specific to customer incidents in order to limit the number of records that would require reviewing..

If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for some reason, 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

Lee Hill

Senior FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London