TfL Ref: 0847-1819

Thank you for your email received by us on 29 June 2018 asking for information about the monetary cost of cycling/public consultations which require alteration to the public highway.

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. You asked for the following:

Since 2012 until 2018 what has been the monetary cost of cycling/public consultations which require alteration to the public highway.

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 £1,400 to provide a response to your current request. This is because it is estimated that it would take 56 hours working hours to retrieve and compile the information you have requested. Spend on consultations is not paid by a single budget. Therefore spend could be the personal time spent on a project (which may not be recorded) and/or costs of materials, any associated public events and data analysis that would be paid for from project budgets. We have undertaken 308 consultations in the time period requested involving an alteration to a public highway. Consequently, we would need to identify the relevant historic project budget and manager for each consultation as well as manually reviewing data to identify consultation-related spend and staff time allocated to it. As some projects have more than one budget for the different stages of their project, each one would need to be analysed for the purposes of 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 us. 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. You might also consider limiting your request to a specific consultation that is of interest to you.

Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, we do 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 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

Jasmine Howard
FOI Case Officer
Information Governance
Transport For London