Good Afternoon, On Saturday 22nd of June 2019. I attened the Steam train ride that started at Ealing Broadway. I was wondering if possible under the act to obtain the radio transmission and calls that where made to the train and the underground command center and the same for the impact the day running had on the line. I know they are not generally released to the public expect in major incident inquest but was wondering if possible to obtain. Also and this maybe an even longer shot but was wondering if possible to obtain some of the CCTV footage from the station on the train coming in, out ,at and around the station. This would be for personal interest as I like the ins and outs of events that could be of historical interest. Many thanks for your time and help with this matter,

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TfL Ref: FOI-0882-1920

Thank you for your email received by Transport for London (TfL) on 26 June 2019.

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.

However, we are refusing your request under section 14(1) of the Act. Connect radio recordings are retrieved for the purposes of incident investigation and not for personal collection.

Releasing the recordings to anyone who requests them for their personal use would set an unrealistic precedent; meaning anyone could request the voice recordings from any journey they took which would be hugely burdensome to provide. The contract for the recordings is with Citylink Consortium. As such it would be easy for Citylink to argue that a requirement to provide the recordings for potentially everyone who travels on the network or who has an interest in them, would impose an unforeseen expense which is outside of the contract requirements.

Furthermore, the recordings may contain personal data or security information which would have to be removed prior to disclosure. This could only be identified by someone having to trawl through long periods of the voice recordings to locate any sensitive information. This would clearly impose a significant burden on TfL in terms of staff time and resources.

Concerning your request for the CCTV footage from that day, firstly you would have to supply us with specific times in order to obtain the recordings, and secondly in order to retrieve the required footage, someone would have to view the entire tape and redact people’s faces or anything else that could enable an individual to be identified.

In light of the above, we consider your request lacks serious purpose or value and requesting all the recordings places an unreasonable burden on us.  

Our principal duty is to provide an effective transport service for London and we consider that answering this request would represent a disproportionate effort. It would be a significant distraction from our work managing the TfL network, requiring re-allocation of already limited resources and placing an unacceptable burden on the particular team that manages and processes requests for the radio recordings. We do wish to clarify that whilst we consider that your request falls under section 14(1) of the FOI Act, this does not reflect a conclusion that it has been your intention to deliberately place an undue burden on our resources.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) guidance states that one of the indicators of a request which may fall under section 14(1) is that it “appears to be part of a completely random approach, lacks any clear focus, or seems to have been solely designed for the purpose of ‘fishing’ for information without any idea of what might be revealed.”

The ICO guidance provides the following examples of a ‘fishing expedition’ request which may fall under section 14(1) if it:

- Imposes a burden by obliging the authority to sift through a substantial volume of information to isolate and extract the relevant details;

- Encompasses information which is only of limited value because of the wide scope of the request;

- Creates a burden by requiring the authority to spend a considerable amount of time considering any exemptions and redactions.

We consider the burden of retrieving and supplying the data would be disproportionate to the benefit of providing it. Therefore, we are refusing it under s.14 of the FOI Act.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Eva Hextall

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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