Please provide details of all London boroughs that place bids as part of Grant Shapps £250m emergency active travel fund. Please provide details of the bids from each council with supporting information provided by each borough. Please advise a break down of each individual scheme and if the bids were successful if not

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TfL Ref: FOI-1434-2021

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 26 October 2020.

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. You asked:

Please provide details of all London boroughs that placed bids as part of Grant Shapps £250m emergency active travel fund. Please provide details of the  bids from each council with supporting information provided by each borough. Please advise a breakdown of each individual scheme and if the bids were successful if not.

As TfL’s entire Streetspace Programme falls under the Emergency Active Transport Fund (EATF) umbrella, we would have to provide you with all the bids we’ve assessed and funded. There have been over a thousand bids that boroughs provided to us through supporting plans, drawings and other documentation. Whilst we have submitted a list of recommended schemes to the DfT, we are still awaiting a confirmation of funding and therefore none of the bids can be considered to be ‘successful’ yet.

However, we are refusing to provide details of the bids under section 14(1) of the FOI Act. Due to the large volume of information that your request captures, we consider that providing it would place an unreasonable burden on us. Our principal duty is to provide an effective transport service for London and we consider that answering this request would represent a disproportionate effort. It would be a significant distraction from our work managing the TfL network, requiring re-allocation of already limited resources and placing an unacceptable burden on a small number of specialist personnel. We do wish to clarify that whilst we consider that your request falls under section 14(1) of the FOI Act, this does not reflect a conclusion that it has been your intention to deliberately place an undue burden on our resources.

The ICO guidance provides the following examples of a request which may fall under section 14(1) if it:

• Imposes a burden by obliging the authority to sift through a substantial volume of information to isolate and extract the relevant details;
• Encompasses information which is only of limited value because of the wide scope of the request;
• Creates a burden by requiring the authority to spend a considerable amount of time considering any exemptions and redactions.

Our view is that all three of these examples apply in this instance.

We would have to manually review each and individual bid submission in order to retrieve and extract the relevant documentation. We would also need to inspect every document to ensure that all personal data has been removed in accordance with our obligations under the Data Protection Act, as well as considering whether any other exemptions might apply. The large volume and size of the documents would mean that we wouldn’t be able to email them to you and would have to find another way of releasing them. Due to alternative working arrangements aligned with the Government’s measures to tackle the coronavirus, we do not currently have access to the necessary hardware required to supply information on CDs or other hardware devices. Processing your request would require individuals to attend office premises, contrary to current government advice, in order to access the relevant equipment to compile the information you have requested.

We consider this to be a disproportionate burden on our staff and the considerable amount of time it would take us to comply accordingly is not something that would be proportionate given the inevitable effect that diversion of specialist and critical resources would have on our functions . We consider the burden of retrieving, reviewing and redacting the information covered by your request would be disproportionate to the benefit of providing it. Therefore, we are refusing it under s14 of the FOI Act.

If you have specific questions regarding the bids, it may be more beneficial to ask this as a direct request rather than ask for all the bids, as this would lead to concerns about the processing time and resources required. You may also find it more beneficial to focus on a specific borough of interest or ask the boroughs themselves for further information on their plans.

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

Eva Hextall

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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