Request ID: FOI-0906-2122 Date published: 13 August 2021
You asked
Please can you provide any data you have regarding the yearly number of graffiti offences on TFL trains over the past 35 years. Ideally, I would like to see data held from 1985 onward or as far back as your records can show.
Thank you.
We answered
TfL Ref: FOI-0874-2122 and FOI-0906-2122
Thank you for your requests received by Transport for London (TfL) on 30th July 2021 date asking for information about graffiti on trains.
Your requests have been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy.
Specifically you asked:
Case ref FOI-0874-2122:
Please can you provide the annual number of public complaints related to graffiti on trains. I would like information covering the past 35 years; therefore, please can you provide any data from 1985 onward if that's possible or as far back as your records can show.
Case ref FOI-0906-2122
Please can you provide any data you have regarding the yearly number of graffiti offences on TFL trains over the past 35 years. Ideally, I would like to see data held from 1985 onward or as far back as your records can show.
I can confirm that we hold some of the information you require. However, I am afraid your requests are being refused under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act. Under section 12, TfL is not obliged to provide information if it would cost more than £450 to determine if that information is held, and to then locate, retrieve or extract it from elsewhere This is calculated at a rate of £25 per hour, equivalent to 18 hours work. Where requests from the same applicant asking for the ‘same or similar’ information have been received in any consecutive 60 working-day period they can be aggregated for the purposes of calculating costs, which applies in this instance (although note that we believe that answering your cases in isolation would still breach the costs limit in both cases).
There is no single source for the information you have requested and no particularly easy or efficient way of locating it. Note that TfL came into existence in the year 2000, and while we do hold information relating to our predecessor bodies much of that will be stored in our Corporate Archives. It is difficult for us to ascertain, therefore, exactly what we might hold going back as far as 1985 without expending a considerable amount of resource across various teams. This is also true of more recent years. As an example, regarding your question about complaints, our records date back to 2014 only. In 2017 we began using a new case management system for handling complaints, meaning that there are two different systems where our complaints records are stored. For the period 2014-2017 we are not able to search on a keyword such as “graffiti” and would therefore have to consider how such complaints may have been categorised, and then trawl thousands of records to identify the material relevant to your request. For the period 2017 onwards, while we would be able to search our records for any complaint file containing the word “graffiti”, this would not return complaints solely about graffiti “on trains” (such as on the London Underground, TfL Rail or the London Overground) as specified in your request. Rather, such a search would find any complaint mentioning the word “graffiti” no matter where that graffiti was - such as graffiti on TfL buildings, property, or any other mode of transport (buses, trams etc.). Again, we would have to manually trawl through all of these records to find those that are relevant to your request. For these reasons we believe your requests would far exceed the costs limit.
In order to bring your cases within the costs limit you may therefore wish to reframe them, taking into account the advice above. For example, we would be able to report on the number of complaints about “graffiti” in general for the period from 2017 onwards. In terms of instances of graffiti on trains, I would advise that you first review the information that has already been placed into the public domain on this subject before considering any revised request. We have previously answered other FOI requests on this subject, copies of which can be found on our website here (you can use the search function to search on cases containing the word “graffiti”): https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transparency/freedom-of-information
For example, the following case may be of interest:
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,
David Wells FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
