May I adjust this request to ask for the correspondence to reflect a more narrow time range, specifically 01 January 2017 and 25 April 2017.

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TfL Ref: FOI-1046-1718

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 3 August asking for information about the Northern Line extension.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. I can confirm we do hold the information you require.

However, 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 considerably exceed the appropriate limit to provide a response to your requests. This is because we would need to manually inspect thousands of emails to determine which are covered by your request. A keyword search would provide a significant amount of results, with many of the emails not being specifically related to the extension itself. For example, there will almost certainly be many emails that feature the names of the proposed Northern line stations on the extension but do not actually relate to the extension itself. Similarly there are likely to be emails on the subject of the extension but which do not specifically reference the term ‘extension’ such as emails in relation to Kennington station.

To manually locate, extract and collate all of the relevant emails caught by such a wide ranging search would considerably exceed the cost limit. While the search itself can be done remotely, the only way to review the results is through a manual process to determine which emails are relevant.

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. For example, by focusing on one particular aspect of the subject matter or for a narrowed period of time, between specific individuals and a more specific keyword.

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

Yours sincerely

Lee Hill

Senior FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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