Our ref: FOI-1325-2324/GH
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 25 July 2023 asking for information about trains failing to call at railway stations.
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 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 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’.
For example, for London Underground alone, we would need to manually review individually the descriptions of each incident to confirm if they were relevant to your request. This is because we do not have a specific category code to narrow down the incidents to the situations you are asking for. We have a range of incident categories that potentially could include these situations, but we would still need to read the descriptions one by one to confirm them as no reporting category code refers specifically to the driver forgetting/accidentally not calling at a station.
For the last 5 years alone and with covid lockdowns, we have over 200,000 incidents recorded on London Underground. Looking at likely categories for the type of incidents you refer to, we estimate over 1,000 of them may be relevant, and we would therefore need to read the detailed descriptions of each one of them to see if they were relevant to your request. Whilst many of these would probably not be relevant, we would still need to manually look at these 1000 records, which would take an excessive amount of time, and would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’. Searching for the information for a longer time period, as requested, and compiling the same information for London Overground, Elizabeth Line, TFL Rail, Docklands Light Railway and Croydon Tramlink services would clearly increase the burden.
To help bring the cost of responding to your requests within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider refining your requests to concentrate on matters which are important to you. You may wish to consider focussing on a specific mode of transport and for a much shorter period of time.
Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, TfL does not have to answer your question if it would require the creation of new information or the provision of a judgement, explanation, advice or opinion that was not already recorded at the time of your request. If you have specific questions relating to these topics we may be more easily able to respond to these than to a request for any 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
