F/on from: FOI-4529-1718 I would like to refine this request as follows: Please supply all correspondence including emails and the logging of complaints/problems (including incorrect charging) with the contactless payment methods on all forms of TFL travel in Nov 2017.

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Our ref: FOI-0750-1819/GH

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 20 June 2018 asking for copies of correspondence from November 2017.

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.

I can confirm that we do hold the information you require. However, to provide the information you have requested would still unfortunately exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

As you are aware, 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. In this instance, we estimate that the time required to answer your request would exceed 18 hours which, at £25 per hour (the rate stipulated by the Regulations), exceeds the ‘appropriate limit’.

Whilst you have refined your request, in order for us to search for ‘all correspondence including emails and the logging of complaints/problems (including incorrect charging) with the contactless payment methods on all forms of TFL travel in Nov 2017’ we would still need to carry out an email search. I believe it will help if I may explain how such a search is carried out.

As the request asked for communication generated in November 2017, this information is most likely to be held as an archived email. Our emails become archived 15 days after the date of receipt and are then stored in the Enterprise Vault.

When requests for the disclosure of email correspondence are received, the FOI Case Management team will generally use a search tool called Discovery Accelerator. This tool has the capacity to remotely search the entirety of the Enterprise Vault based on a series of search parameters, such as sender, recipient, timeframes and any identifying, relevant keywords to be located within the email or associated attachment.

As your request is broad, we could only use the search parameters of the date, and the keyword ‘contactless’. This search had got approximately 1/25 of the way through and it was already at over 2,800 hits. As this was already an excessive amount of emails to manually check through we stopped the search at this point. Had it been left to run we estimate that it could have identified over 50,000 emails, each of which would need to be firstly retrieved, then read to see if relevant to your request.

Within this number would be a significant number of duplicates, as well as emails which were not relevant to your request but caught by the search because of the broad search criteria necessary to locate those that would be relevant. Therefore the actual number of relevant emails is likely to be significantly lower than this figure. However, to locate, extract and collate all of the emails that are relevant could only be done by manually reviewing each of the results. Even allowing an extremely conservative estimate of 1 minute to scan through each email/email chain would considerably exceed the cost limit.

To help bring the cost of responding to your requests within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider refining your requests to concentrate on matters which are important to you.

Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, TfL does 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. If you have specific questions relating to Contactless we may be more easily able to respond to these than to a request for any information held.

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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