Follow on from FOI-0996-1718 - How much has it cost Tfl to change/adapt their announcements across the transport network following the change to 'hello everyone'? - How much has it cost Tfl to retrain/brief staff and update relevant guidance/documents/handbooks in light of this change? - How many complaints have London Underground received in the last year about the use of the announcement 'ladies and gentlemen'?

---

TfL Ref: FOI-1245-1718

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 23 August 2017 asking for information about Tube announcements.

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 hold some of the information you require.

We have been able to change a number of announcements for no cost – including those made live on station by station staff (on platforms) and those recorded and played back on station by station staff. These staff were briefed internally and so no cost was incurred on this or any other guidance.

Unfortunately, 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 ran a keyword search of our complaints data using the term ‘ladies and gentlemen’ and ‘ladies & gentlemen’ over a year but could find no complaints on the use of those terms. However, in order to provide a full answer, we ran a further search using the keyword ‘announcements’ but this returned in excess of 1600 results. We would need to manually review each of these results to determine whether the complaint refers in any way to the specific subject of your request.

As you were advised in my previous response, to do this for such a significant volume of correspondence would significantly exceed the cost limit. 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 you may wish to request specific keywords or a more narrowed period of time..

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.

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

Lee Hill

Senior FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

Back to top

---