Please state the number of begging incidents recorded on TfL vehicles in each of the last five years. Please provide all disclosable fields from your recording system, including the date of the incident, the category of incident and any free text description held about the incident.

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Our ref: FOI-1170-1920/GH

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 22 July 2019 asking for information about begging incidents.

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

I can confirm that we do hold some of the information you require. However, we record begging incidents together with busking incidents, and would not be able to separate these without looking at the record of each incident individually.

Therefore, 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.

If you would like to know the number of begging / busking incidents recorded, please let us know. However, we only hold the data from April 2014 to March 2016 for Bus Driver Incident Reports - we do not hold data for London Underground before April 2016. From April 2016 to March 2019 we hold the information for incidents on Buses and London Underground only.

You have also asked for the free text description of each incident. We estimate that we have over 2000 recorded incidents. Many of the text descriptions include personal information and we would therefore need to manually read each one and apply redactions where necessary. The burden this task would place on us means that, in accordance with section 14 of the FOI Act, we would most probably refuse any revised request if this element were to remain.

Also I can advise that we do not hold data for Tram, DLR, London Overground or TfL Rail systems. The British Transport Police (BTP) may be able to provide this information, but only on incidents that were reported to them. Incidents that staff were aware of but where no further action was taken would not be recorded by the BTP.

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

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

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