TfL Ref: 1140-1920

Thank you for your request received by us on 18 July 2019 asking for copies of internal delay reports for incidents of delays on London Underground’s Metropolitan line during 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. You asked for:

copies of internal delay reports for incidents of delays on the Metropolitan Line during the month of June 2019.

However, we are refusing your request under section 14(1) of the Act. There are 514 separate Electronic Incident Report Forms (EIRFs), all of which would need to be reviewed and suitably formatted for the purposes of your request given that there will be personal information and the use of acronyms which would need to be redacted and explained respectively, some of the descriptions will also need to summarised as they go into great detail. As these reports are created for operational purposes, a substantial amount of work will need to be undertaken for these EIRFS to be devised in a format suitable for public disclosure.

As previously mentioned, the EIRFs have personal data and may contain security information which would have to be removed prior to disclosure. This could only be identified by someone having to scrutinise each EIRF to locate any sensitive information. This would clearly impose a significant burden on TfL in terms of staff time and resources.

In light of the above, we consider your request lacks serious purpose or value and requesting every EIRF for a month 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. If you would like to re-submit a more specific request then we will, of course, consider it.

In the meantime, you may be interested in the London Underground almanac, as this publishes details of service performance, including train delays, percentages of trains in service and other service performance measures for each line via the following link to our website: https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/publications-and-reports/underground-services-performance#on-this-page-0

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