All emails between TfL and the following companies: Battersea Power Station Development Corporation FLO (Ferrovial Agroman Laing O'Rourke) Bouygues On the subject of the Northern Line Extension between 1 January 2017 and 25 April 2017.

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TfL Ref: FOI-1494-1718

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 15 September 2017 asking for information about correspondence.

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 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 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 conducted a remote search of correspondence held within our email archive sent to or from an email account linked to the named companies, within the time period specified, that contained the keyword “Northern Line Extension” or “NLE” and this produced over 2,200 results. We have therefore estimated that it would considerably exceed the appropriate limit to provide a response to your requests.

This is because we would need to manually inspect thousands of emails to determine which are covered by your request and then collate accordingly. A brief review of these emails has shown that the keyword features in the ‘email signature’ of various staff members and so the content of the email itself may not necessarily be on the subject of the Northern Line Extension, but the email has been caught by virtue of the keyword being featured within it. Similarly there are likely to be emails on the subject of the extension but which do not specifically reference the term ‘extension’ such as emails in relation to Kennington station.

To manually locate, extract and collate all of the relevant emails caught by such a wide ranging search would considerably 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, by focusing on one particular aspect of the subject matter or for a narrowed period of time, between specific individuals and a more specific keyword.

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

Yours sincerely

Lee Hill

Senior FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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