Under the Freedom of Information Act I request the following information: 1. The amount of money TFL has made from charging customers in lost property fees for the last five years (broken down by year); 2. The amount of money TFL has made from selling lost property for the last five years (broken down by year) Please provide partial information where full data is not available. Please give data in an excel format.

---

TfL Ref: 1622-1819

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 14 September 2018 asking for information about lost property. 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.

We publish information on the Lost Property Office’s income from fees and sales of lost items. This can be found at https://tfl.gov.uk/help-and-contact/lost-property#on-this-page-9.  Please see the data attached for the period you are interested in.

We work hard to reunite owners with their property and in order to do this efficiently, we charge a small fee to help cover part of the cost of collecting, cataloguing and storing found items. All of the income received goes towards the running of the Lost Property Office (LPO), which handles more than 300,000 items each year.  In 2017/18 the operating costs for the service were around £2.5M which was partially offset by around £800k of income.  The net result is that it costs TfL c £1.7m to run the service.

If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for any reason, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.

Yours sincerely

Sara Thomas

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

Attachments

Back to top

---