Request ID: FOI-1716-2122 Date published: 25 November 2021
You asked
Dear Transport for London,
Please could you provide details of the ongoing annual maintenance costs of your SCADA system for the financial year 19/20.
We answered
TfL Ref: 1716- 2122
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 3 November 2021 asking for details on the ongoing annual maintenance costs of our SCADA system for the financial year 19/20.
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 some of the information you require. However, it is not possible to source it all within the costs limit for responding to requests as set out in section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act. Under section 12, a public authority such as TfL is not required to provide information if it would cost more than £450 to determine if that information is held, and to then locate, retrieve or extract it from elsewhere. This is calculated at a rate of £25 per hour, equivalent to 18 hours work.
TfL uses a number of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) or control systems across multiple assets within most of our transport modes, for example they are used to manage our power systems within London Underground, to manage our road tunnels in our Surface Transport, in CCTV systems across the network, within Crossrail, the DLR and as part of our tube signalling systems. These systems are generally managed locally as they are specific to the business requirements and work on different aspects of the systems is carried out by both in house personnel and by third party contractors depending on the nature of the systems and the works involved. There is no quick or efficient way of reporting on the overall annual maintenance costs which would be made up of many individual elements across all the systems used within TfL and there is no centralised records held on overall maintenance expenditure from where we could extract the data you are requesting. The work involved in trying to gather this information together would significantly exceed the cost limit.
In order to bring your request within the costs limit you may wish to consider narrowing its scope to focus on the information that is of most importance to you, for example one particular SCADA system in a specific business area. Before doing so you may wish to review the advice and guidance offered by the Information Commissioner on how best to access information from public bodies, published on its website here (I would, in particular, point you to the table of ‘Dos and Don’t’s’ that can be found halfway down the page):
The narrower and more specific the scope of your request the more likely it is we will be able to respond positively within the costs limit. Please be aware also that the FOI Act pertains to recorded information only. There is no requirement to create new information nor to source information from third parties.
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
