TfL Ref: FOI-0786-1718

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 29 June 2017 asking for information about an organisational change.

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 exceed the appropriate limit to provide a response to this request. This is because we would need to manually inspect several hundred emails that are potentially covered by your request. As Joe Perry no longer works for TfL, the only way to locate, extract and collate the information requested is to conduct a remote search on his mailbox.

A search was conducted over the specified timeframe using keywords “LCG” and “Surface Health Safety“ and this produced 692 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 current 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, a narrowed period of time, or emails between specific individuals.

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