Request ID: FOI-0872-2324 Date published: 13 July 2023
You asked
Follow-up from FOI-0547-2324:
Can you please send me all correspondence between TfL and Keir Starmer's office between May 2015 and January 2020?
We answered
Our Ref: FOI-0872-2324
Thank you for your request received on 21 June 2023 asking for correspondence between TfL and Keir Starmer’s office.
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 that we do hold the information you require.
Unfortunately, to provide the information you have requested would still 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 over £450 to provide a response to your request. This is because it is estimated that it would take in excess of 18 working hours to retrieve and compile the information you have requested.
We have done an initial search for all emails between TfL and Keir Starmer’s office for the revised timeframe, this has returned around 850 hits. As previously advised, this number will likely include duplicates, as well as emails not caught by the request. However, we would still need to manually review all of the emails identified by the search in order to extract and collate the relevant emails.
To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to narrow its scope so that we can more easily locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking. By their nature, emails contain a significant amount of personal data such as phone numbers and email addresses and so, whilst this process of redaction does not feature as part of our considerations on whether the cost limit might apply, the burden created by non-specific requests for emails is significant and this should be borne in mind before submitting requests of this nature. Requests that lack a clear focus are more likely to lead to concerns about the processing time required to meet our obligations under the FOI Act. If there are any particular subjects that you are interested in this would help in narrowing our search parameters and hopefully provide information that is useful to you without exceeding the appropriate limit.
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.
Yours sincerely
Gemma Jacob Senior FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
