Request ID: FOI-0791-2122 Date published: 23 August 2021
You asked
I would please like to find out the basis of how your uplift on invoices for payment by insurers (for example when your chattel experiences a vehicular impact), is calculated, the historical level it was set at for the last 2 years and any guidance/procedure used to calculate this. An example can be provided if necessary.
I would also like to receive any communications TFL holds on this and communications with external agents or your reasons for withholding this.
We answered
Thank you for your further email which we received on 28 July 2021.
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 considerably exceed the cost limit to provide a response to your current request.
As I mentioned Turnamms handle cases from all parts of TfL, and therefore each part of the organisation would have separate communication with them. Each part of the business submits details of the individual losses straight to Turnamms, and they make the recovery on behalf of the business. Any recovery goes back to the relevant part of the business.
We do not have any centralised record of all this and so to locate this information requires us to conduct a remote email search across different departments. We have conducted email searches of the email accounts most likely to have had discussions on the application of the uplift on invoices for damages to TfL’s property and this produced over 1,400 hits. This excessive volume of information would require comprehensive review. Each email caught by the search would need to be manually reviewed to determine whether it’s concerning the right topic. Many of the hits would likely to be not relevant, duplicates, due to emails being repeated within email chains. Whilst the actual number of emails covered by your request might be a sub-set of the numbers the email search captured, it is the excessive work involved in having to locate and extract those that are relevant and meet your request, that would be very burdensome.
Furthermore there are likely to be additional emails relevant to your request that may not have been caught by the email searches and so we would likely need to conduct further searches using additional keywords and finding relevant members of TfL staff who would have had discussions on this topic, to ensure that everything relevant has been located and collated.
To further provide documentation on how uplifts to invoices are calculated would of course increase the processing time required to complete your request.
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. If you want to refine your request or make a Freedom of Information Act request in future, please bear in mind that the Freedom of Information Act allows you to request recorded information held by Transport for London. You should identify the information that you want as clearly and concisely as you can, specifying the types of documents that you are looking for. You might also consider limiting your request to a shorter period of time or specific departments of TfL.
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 do not hesitate to contact me.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
