Request ID: FOI-1344-2122 Date published: 05 October 2021
You asked
Hi there,
I would like to know the following under the Freedom of Information Act.
Over the last five years, broken down by year.
• Number of staff disciplined for misusing social media and IT systems.
• In each incident please detail the platform e.g., Tik Tok, Facebook, Instagram, work Email, etc
• Please also detail the nature of the incident e.g. posted confidential data
• And the outcome e.g. first written warning, final written warning, dismissal etc.
We answered
TfL Ref: 1344-2122
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 24 September 2021 asking for information about staff misuse of Social Media and IT systems.
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 remainder of 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 have estimated that it would significantly exceed the cost limit to provide a response to your current request.
This is because our database where records of all Disciplinary Cases are held does not contain a field in which a report could be run which is filtered by the criteria you have asked about in your request. Disciplinary matters of this type would be generically recorded under ‘Code of Conduct’ - which can be used for any action where a member of staff is considered to have broken TfL's staff Code of Conduct. We have identified in excess of 1600 disciplinary cases that have been recorded as ‘Code of Conduct’ issues over the requested five year period. In order to identify which of these cases relate to IT misuse we would need to manually review all of the case files, and then summarise and extract the requested information.
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, by narrowing the timeframe. 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.
Please note that we will not be taking further action until we receive your revised request. In the meantime, if you have any queries or would like to discuss your request, please feel free to contact me.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Sara Thomas FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
