Dear Transport for London, Please could you confirm how many service cancellations there have been on Overground and Southern trains at Forest Hill station in the past 3 years ending Oct 2020.

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TfL Ref 1715-2021

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 27 November 2020 asking for information about train service cancellations from Forest Hill train station in the last three years.

I can confirm that we do hold some of 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 requests 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. In this instance, we estimate that the time required to answer your request would exceed 18 hours which, at £25 per hour (the rate stipulated by the Regulations), exceeds the ‘appropriate limit’.

We estimate it would take in excess of 30 hours to answer your request for information on the number of service cancellations from Forest Hill train station over the three year period you’ve asked about.  This is because the figures you’ve asked for would need to be extracted from archived data held on industry systems by Network Rail. Due to the size and complexity of the data this is not an insiginficant task, involving multiple levels of queries on the databases to extract information and then validate/match to the right service/location codes required. Often, the size of the files requires significant processing time.

           

Performance data held by Network Rail on industry systems is vast and is regularly archived adding complexing to any historical data requests. We do keep historical records of performance information ourselves of course but only at route level and we don’t hold information for Southern services.

We’ve put together a guide to help members of the public to obtain some of this publicly available information themselves, which we have attached, however the information is generally available only for the previous 100 days.

The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) produce key statistics which are available by train operator on their website which you may find useful. The links for London Overground for years 2018/19 and 2019/20 are as follows:

https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1387/london-overground-key-stats-1819.pdf

https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1879/london-overground-key-stats-2019-20.pdf

To help bring the cost of responding to your requests within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider refining your requests to concentrate on matters which are important to you.

Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, TfL does not have to answer your question if it would require the creation of new information or the provision of a judgement, explanation, advice or opinion that was not already recorded at the time of your request. If you have specific questions relating to these topics we may be more easily able to respond to these than to a request for any information held.

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.

If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Sara Thomas

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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