TfL Ref: 0929-1920

Thank you for your request received by us on 1 July 2019 asking for information about accessibility assessments for London Underground stations.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. You asked for:

a copy of the latest accessibility assessment for each of the 220 stations that do not have wheelchair accessibility

There are 270 stations on the London Underground network and currently 78 of these are step free.

We do not have feasibility studies (or ‘accessibility assessments’) for each of the 192 non-step free stations on the network. They are very costly to produce and so we only commission them for stations where we think there is a good chance that lifts could be installed.

The feasibility documents we do hold, which are approximately 80 in total, go back many years and are not held in a central repository. These assessments are generally over one hundred pages long and contain large amounts of very technical information. They are not intended for publication, rather they are used as tool for our highly experienced teams to assess how and where lifts could be installed, along with an estimate of costs. To try and provide these feasibility documents would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 as a member of staff would need to manually identify, locate and retrieve them from a large volume of varying folders and files held across different teams.

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.

However, if you could explain what you mean by accessibility assessment’ and provide some further detail on the type of information you are seeking, we would reconsider your request accordingly.

In the meantime, both TfL and the Mayor are committed to improving step-free access across London and in December 2016 Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, announced the creation of a new step-free access programme that would significantly improve the number of step-free stations across the Tube network. Under this programme:

• Three stations have already been made step free.

• A further 12 stations will be made step-free by Spring 2020.

• At least seven more will become step-free by 2024.

This will increase the number of step-free stations on the network to over a hundred and increase the total from 28% today to 38% by 2024.

If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for any reason, please do not hesitate to contact me.

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