Ill-health retirement for London Underground staff
Request ID: FOI-1615-2324 Date published: 14 September 2023
You asked
Please confirm how many London Underground staff over the past fifteen years have received a pension linked to ill-health retirement. For each London Underground staff member who has received an ill-health pension at any point over the past fifteen years, please provide a breakdown of the type of ill-health that caused their retirement. If it is not possible to provide a breakdown, please confirm the number of London Underground staff who, at any point over the past fifteen years, received an ill-health pension in relation to a respiratory illness.
We answered
TfL Ref: FOI-1615-2324
Thank you for your request which we received on 15 August 2023, asking for information about London Underground staff.
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 hold some of the information you require. You asked:
Please confirm how many London Underground staff over the past fifteen years have received a pension linked to ill-health retirement.
The table below shows the number of London Underground employees that retired due to ill health in the past 15 years;
Year Number of employees
2008 88
2009 61
2010 94
2011 60
2012 64
2013 62
2014 77
2015 83
2016 61
2017 76
2018 103
2019 76
2020 44
2021 73
2022 77
For each London Underground staff member who has received an ill-health pension at any point over the past fifteen years, please provide a breakdown of the type of ill-health that caused their retirement. If it is not possible to provide a breakdown, please confirm the number of London Underground staff who, at any point over the past fifteen years, received an ill-health pension in relation to a respiratory illness.
Unfortunately, to provide you with the breakdown 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 do not hold the type of ill health in a reportable form and therefore we would have to manually review 15 years’ worth of employees’ records to try to locate the ill health reason / respiratory illness. This would take an excessive amount of staff time and resources to retrieve and compile.
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, you may wish to limit your request to a particular document or a narrowed period of time.
If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Eva Hextall FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
