TfL Ref: FOI-0761-1718

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 27 June 2017 asking for information about meeting actions.

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

However, 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 considerably exceed the appropriate limit to provide a response to this request. This is because we would need to manually inspect several thousand emails that are potentially covered by your request. You have asked for “all recorded information that states or demonstrates precisely what actions TFL took as a result of each and every one of those points”. The meeting you refer to took place in September 2015. In order for us to locate, extract and collate “all recorded information” that documents any work relating to the points discussed in the meeting would require us to review every email sent by any of the individuals involved since that date and then extract anything that relates to the points discussed at the meeting.

As an example, two of the action points you refer to were “Look at how we better promote lift closures to our customers” and “Review how accessibility information is accessed with aim of simplifying”. An email search using the keywords “lift” and “accessibility” was conducted on one employee involved in the meeting you refer to, and this search produced almost 20,000 hits. A ‘hit’ refers to an email found within our IT system that potentially fits within the scope of your request. Many of the hits are likely to be duplicates, due to emails being repeated within email chains, as well as emails being forwarded internally for discussion during this time period. Therefore the actual number of emails covered by your request will be a sub-set of these hits. However, locating those that are relevant would require us to manually review all of them to determine whether the email, or email chain, is relevant to your request and then we would need to extract and compile all of those that meet your request.

Conducting this process for such a large amount of emails would breach the cost limit. There would, of course, be further work involved in collating any information held by other employees but we have not gone on to consider this for the purposes of determining the cost exemption.

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 limit your request to a particular document, more specific keywords or a narrowed period of time.

Please be aware that we are also mindful of the fact that your request appears to be targeted towards a specific individual. As the cost limit would be exceeded we have not gone on to consider whether section 14 might be engaged for this request. However, having taken into account your correspondence with TfL we consider that we should draw your attention to the Information Commissioner’s guidance, which identifies the following criteria as indicators of potentially vexatious requests:

• The tone or language of the requester’s correspondence goes beyond the level of criticism that a public authority or its employees should reasonably expect to receive.
  
  

   

  
  
  
• For whatever reason, the requester is targeting their correspondence towards a particular employee or office holder against whom they have some personal enmity.

https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1198/dealing-with-vexatious-requests.pdf

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

Yours sincerely

Lee Hill

Senior FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London