As you kindly suggested, please can you provide details of noise complaints which contain both the words ‘District Line’ and ‘South Kensington’, in order to establish how many emails you have to review. The issue at hand here is that TfL undertook to fit continuous track to resolve an identified noise problem from 2012. This was raised by me and several other residents at the time. We are trying to establish why this did not occur, and if TfL received similar complaints in relation to the specific section of track west of South Kensington station in the cutting between South Terrace and Pelham Street. So any internal correspondence relating to the original enquiry is also requested. We were informed by Mark Hart of TfL that our complaints stemmed from "known current issues" from LU's point of view, being airborne noise from joints and rail roughness. He agreed to share with us the short, medium and long term solutions that TfL proposed along with the timescales for each. The long term solution was to replace the track. This never occurred. The reference of his report was RP-R1524. I hope that narrows down the request sufficiently for you.

---

Our ref: FOI-1095-1819

Thank you for your request which was received on 17 July 2018, requesting copies of noise complaints.

Your requests have been considered under the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and our information access policy.

I can confirm that we do hold the information you require. However, to provide the information you have requested would again 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 requests 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. In this instance, we estimate that the time required to answer your request would exceed 18 hours which, at £25 per hour (the rate stipulated by the Regulations), exceeds the ‘appropriate limit’.

We have carried out a search for noise issues which mention the district line and south Kensington for the last financial year (2017/18). This resulted in over 5,200 cases being identified. These would have to be read for relevance to the FOI request, as well as having to be redacted. This alone would exceed the cost limit, but doesn’t not include any internal communications which you have requested, and does not go back to 2012 as requested.

If you have specific questions relating to this topic we may be more easily able to respond to these than to a request for all information held.

If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Graham Hurt

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

Back to top

---