Request ID: FOI-0800-2122 Date published: 26 July 2021
You asked
• How many other people, in similar situations to ours has this ludicrous policy affected?
• How many people have made similar appeals?
We answered
TfL Ref: FOI-0800-2122
Thank you for your request of 29th June 2021 asking for information about the Residents Discount for the Congestion Charge.
As you are requesting recorded information your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy.
I can confirm that we hold the information you require. However, I am afraid that to source it would take longer than the 18 hour limit for responding to FOI cases as set out under section 12 of the FOI Act. Under section 12 TfL is not required to respond to a request for information if it would take more than £450 to determine if the information is held, and to then locate, retrieve or extract that information from elsewhere. This is calculated at a rate of £25 per hour.
The functionality to apply for a new residents discount has been removed from our website. Therefore it is currently not possible to submit an application which would be recorded on our Congestion Charging discounts system. If a customer who is not registered for a residents discount contacts us about the discount, this is currently dealt with as general correspondence and recorded within a separate correspondence system. While we record the reasons why general correspondence has been sent to us, these reasons include broad categories such as ‘Discounts’, ‘Policy’ and ‘Complaints’ and will include correspondence about all schemes operated by our Road User Charging team. To identify requests specifically about applying for a new residents discount we would need to manually review all correspondence within the relevant categories.
We have conducted a search of our correspondence system and identified 829 items received between 1 August 2020 and 30 June 2021 that could potentially include requests or complaints about new residents discounts. We estimate it would take a minimum of 5 minutes to locate and manually review each item to establish if it relates to a new residents discount. Once these are identified, additional time would be needed to review the identified cases to establish if the correspondence contains a request or an appeal. This would be well in excess of the costs limit outlined above.
In order to bring your request within the costs limit you may wish to reframe it to narrow its scope - for example, by limiting the request to a specific, narrower timeframe.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely,
David Wells FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
