Our Ref:         FOI-0758-1920

Thank you for your request received on 12 June 2019 asking for information about Pelham Street, South Kensington.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy. I can confirm 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 estimated that it would cost over £450 to provide a response to your current request. This is because it is estimated that it would take over 18 working hours to retrieve and compile the information you have requested.

When requests for email correspondence are received the FOI Case Management team may use a search tool called Discovery Accelerator. This allows us to conduct company wide email searches using keywords, dates and email addresses. The more specific a requester can be as to what they are looking for, the more we can narrow the search and therefore stand a better chance of a more relevant or focused result. A search will then return an amount of ‘hits’ which potentially contain information relating to the search terms used. Each ‘hit’ is a single email, although that email will often consist of a chain of emails containing the search term at least once.

We have done an initial search for all emails held by TfL between Native Land or Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners with TfL staff between December 2016 and the date of your request using the keyword ‘Pelham Street’. This search has returned over 540 hits. A number of these will duplicates, as well as emails that are not caught by the request. However, we would need to manually review all of the emails identified by the search in order to extract and collate the relevant emails. We are therefore refusing this request.

As well as the time taken to review any relevant correspondence, we would also need to identify and locate any other documents, instructions, proposals, designs, and reports that could be captured by your request. It should be noted that once this information was identified some of it may be withheld as it could prejudice our commercial interests as well as those of Native Land’s.

Section 12(4)(a) of the Act provides for the costs of complying with two or more requests made in a 60 working day period which are, to any extent, for the same or similar information to be combined. Section 12(4)(b) provides for requests made by different people acting in concert, or in pursuance of a campaign to be considered together under section 12.

Our records show that this is the fourth request of this nature since 12 May 2019 asking for the same or similar information regarding the South Kensington Station Redevelopment. Whilst you have not made all of these requests, we believe that you are working in concert with the other requesters that have also submitted requests that are clearly similar in nature. We are refusing one of the other outstanding requests under section 12 of the FOI Act. However, we will be providing some information for the other request as it has been narrowed sufficiently following our advice. Please note any further requests that we receive within a 60 working day timeframe from you or any other requesters may also be subject to consideration under section 12 of FOI.

While we appreciate there is a high level of interest in this development, there is a small team available to respond to these requests and the burden placed on them has to be balanced with their substantive roles. To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to prioritise the information you are most interested in and make a single request on a topic, rather than several requests in a short period of time in order to make the best use of the processing time available to you under the FOI Act.

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 remove the request for correspondence from your request or ask only for reports and designs, or narrow the timeframe of the request or provide further keywords that you would like us to search against.

If you want to refine your request or make a FOI Act request in future, please bear in mind that the FOI Act allows you to request recorded information held by TfL. 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. 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.

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 feel free to contact me.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely

Gemma Jacob
Senior FOI Case Officer
FOI Case Management Team
General Counsel
Transport for London

[email protected]