The Home Builders Federation is the representative body for house builders in England, Wales, and Scotland. HBF’s membership of more than 300 companies build the majority of open market homes for sale completed in England and Wales and encompasses private developers and registered providers. The HBF host a series of dedicated technical subgroups to support the housebuilding sector in a bid to share best practice, knowledge and understanding. The subgroup topics range across key industry areas, with highway related matters being one of the most pivotal parts in the delivery in much needed new homes that requires an industry coordinated approach. The HBF Highways subgroup has formulated a series of questions of which, we have been asked to submit to several Local Authority Highway Departments under a Freedom of Information request. There is also a survey at the end of this document asking for your opinion on certain aspects of S278/ S38 agreements, and we would be very grateful if you could fill this in for us along with the FOI request. We kindly request that you do not provide web links, or Excel Spreadsheets as answers to any of the questions as we have had issues with links not working or spreadsheets not opening correctly in the response to our last FOI request. To make it easier for you to provide the answers to our questions I have created a word document with tables for you to fill in which will hopefully make the process of responding easier for you.

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TfL Ref: FOI-1410-2021

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 21^st October 2020 asking for information about highways works.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. 

I can confirm that we hold the information you require. However, under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act we are not required to respond to a request if it would cost more than £450 to determine if the information is held, and to then locate, retrieve or extract that information from elsewhere. This is calculated at a rate of £25 per hour, equivalent to 18 hours work. You have asked a number of questions with multiple elements to them. There is no quick or efficient way for us to source all of the information required to answer them. For example, in regard to the request for the total bond value for S278 and S38 agreements in the past 3 financial years, we do not record the bond value for each agreement in our database. Rather, we would have to manually check each agreement in each financial year to check the amount (around 150 separate records). Similarly, in the highway S38/S278 timescales section, we do not record the date for the milestones requested so this would again involve manually checking each scheme. We would have to go back through email records to check when the technical submission was made and when approval was given. While it is difficult to quantify exactly how long this would take, we believe that sourcing all of the necessary information would far exceed the costs limit.

In order to bring your request within the costs limit you may wish to refine it and narrow its scope, to focus on the information that is of most importance to you.

If you are considering submitting a further FOI request, please think carefully about whether the request is essential at this current time, as answering FOI requests will require the use of limited resources and the attention of staff who could be supporting other essential activity. Where requests are made, please note that our response time may be impacted by the current situation.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely,

David Wells

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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