For the period 1 January 2020 to date 1. Please provide copies of all internal and external communications, letters, memos, data including those with other public bodies such as the police relating to anti-social behaviour in the toilet and waiting room facilities at Snaresbrook, Leytonstone and Leyton stations. 2. Please provide copies of all internal and external communications, letters, memos relating to the decision to close toilet / waiting area facilities including instructions to station staff on the same subject including Snaresbrook, Leytonstone and Leyton stations. 3. The date decisions relating to the closure / amended opening times of the toilet / waiting room facilities at Snaresbrook, Leytonstone and Leyton stations. 4. The number of occasions there has been no station staff present at Snaresbrook, Leytonstone or Leyton stations for all of part of the following times: Mon to Fri – 0600-0930 and 1630-1930hrs.

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TfL Ref: FOI-1795-2021

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 7 December 2020.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. You asked;

For the period 1 January 2020 to date

1. Please provide copies of all internal and external communications, letters, memos, data including those with other public bodies such as the police relating to anti-social behaviour in the toilet and waiting room facilities at Snaresbrook, Leytonstone and Leyton stations.

1. Please provide copies of all internal and external communications, letters, memos relating to the decision to close toilet / waiting area facilities including instructions to station staff on the same subject including Snaresbrook, Leytonstone and Leyton stations.

1. The date decisions relating to the closure / amended opening times of the toilet / waiting room facilities at Snaresbrook, Leytonstone and Leyton stations.

1. The number of occasions there has been no station staff present at Snaresbrook, Leytonstone or Leyton stations for all of part of the following times: Mon to Fri – 0600-0930 and 1630-1930hrs.

We started a trial of restricted opening hours at Leyton/Leytonstone in May 2019. When the restricted opening hours were extended to include weekends (in October 2019), this was based on times when staff had received requests from customers to access the toilets when they were not open. Prior to this the toilets were completely closed. When we completed the trial at the end of 2019, we had agreed that the stations would continue to operate the restricted hours, as they were working effectively. We undertook a short initiative in December 2019 to keep the toilets open throughout the day which resulted in a near immediate restart of vandalism. As a result it was agreed the restricted hours represented a good balance of maintaining availability at key times while minimising the risk that the toilets would have to be closed because they were not in a safe state to use.

Please note the trial described above did not include Snaresbrook station; any decisions about opening hours at Snaresbrook were made by the station staff. Owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, during the initial lockdown in March, it was decided to keep the toilets locked and to only open them on request. Furthermore, due to the lack of available staff at Snaresbrook station, it would not be feasible to keep the facilities open.

Unfortunately, to provide the specific information you have requested in your question 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.

You asked for copies of internal and external communications relating to anti-social behaviour in the toilet and waiting room facilities at Snaresbrook, Leytonstone and Leyton stations and the decision to close them. We do not have any centralised record of correspondence on this subject and so to locate this information requires us to conduct a remote email search across our email records. We have conducted email searches of the email accounts most likely to have held correspondence on this subject using keywords including ‘toilets’, ‘anti-social behaviour’, ‘waiting room’ & ‘facilities’ since January 2020 and this produced several thousand hits. This excessive volume of information would require comprehensive review. Each email caught by the search would need to be manually reviewed to determine whether it’s concerning the topic of antisocial behavior at the required stations and the decision to close them. Many of the hits would likely to be not relevant, duplicates, due to emails being repeated within email chains. Whilst the actual number of emails covered by your request might be a sub-set of the numbers the email search captured, it is the excessive work involved in having to locate and extract those that are relevant and meet your request, that would be very burdensome.

Furthermore there are likely to be additional emails relevant to your request that may not have been caught by the keyword searches and so we would likely need to conduct further searches using additional keywords and finding relevant members of TfL staff who would have had discussions on this topic, to ensure that everything relevant has been located and collated. We would also have to collate log book entries to produce a staff coverage list at Snaresbrook station which would of course increase the processing time required to complete your request.

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, a request for specific reports is less likely to raise concerns about the processing time required to answer it. You may also wish to limit your correspondence search to specific TfL’s modes and shorter period of time.

However, 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.

Please note that we will not be taking further action until we receive your revised request.

In the meantime, if you have any queries or would like to discuss your request, please do not hesitate to contact me.

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

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