I am requesting the following information in line with the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Please provide data listing incidents of all abuse against TfL staff by passengers or members of the public. Please provide the information broken down by tube station/line or bus/tram route/bus stop in which the abusive incident took place, the nature of the abuse where known, and whether the victim identified as male, female, neither or not known. Note: by 'nature of the assault' I mean clarification on whether the incident was physical, verbal, sexual or other. Please provide all of the above information for the three years to date. If this request is too broad to comply with the restrictions of the Act, please reduce it to only contain data on the station/line. Similarly, please reduce the timeframe where necessary, working as far back as possible starting from the date of this request. Please respond to confirm receipt of this request. Thank you

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Our Ref:         FOI-1810-1819

Thank you for your request received on 9 October 2018 asking for information about incidents of staff abuse by passengers.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. I can confirm we hold some of the information you require.

There were nearly 1.36bn journeys made on the London Underground in 2017/18, and 2.3bn made on London’s buses in the same period. Our staff work hard to serve the millions of customers who use our network every day and have the right to go about their work without fear or intimidation. TfL takes workplace violence extremely seriously and we always encourage staff to report any instance of abuse whether physical or non physical so that preventative measures can be taken, and the strongest penalties brought against offenders.

Both TfL and London Underground have specialist units working with both the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and British Transport Police (BTP) police services investigating crimes against staff. These special units were established to investigate physical assault and verbal aggression on staff, public order offences and hate crimes, among other offences. The units have significantly encouraged more staff to report incidents, improved the quality of staff assault investigation and feedback, as well as victim care and support.

Please find the requested information attached. As noted on the spreadsheet, data provided in response to this request has originated from multiple systems across TfL. Effectively categories used are not always consistent. For the London Rail division (Trams, DLR and Overground), incident data have only been centrally collated since 2017/18, therefore prior year data is not available. In completing the request, we have provided categories that exist in our respective reporting systems, these are set out in the tables in the spreadsheet. Gender of the victims is not held within the system so has not been provided. All incidents are reported by individuals affected in the incidents and should not be taken to mean they have been reported to the Police for investigation.
Please note that we also publish a quarterly and annual bulletin on crime and antisocial behaviour on the transport network on our website:

https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/publications-and-reports/crime-and-incident-bulletins

For any crime data not on this bulletin, please contact the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), using the details at www.met.police.uk/foi.

If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for some reason, please feel free to contact me.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Gemma Jacob
Senior FOI Case Officer
FOI Case Management Team
General Counsel
Transport for London

[email protected]

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