Please can you provide details of past property damage to the bus shelters in the Borough of Croydon area, of which we understand there are currently 114 Bus shelters in this area. I am seeking details of incidents in the past 5 years summarised by: date; type of event - e.g. vandalism / accidental or unknown cause of damage / impact damage / weather related etc.; approximate cost of repairs Please can you also confirm if there have been any public liability (i.e. injury or damage to members of the public caused by the shelters) claims made (against tfl) in the last 5 years? If so, please detail each claim by : Date; type of event - how occurred; cost of claim (i.e. legal costs and injury awards) etc.

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TfL Ref: FOI-1838-2021

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 14 December 2020.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and TfL’s information access policy. I can confirm TfL holds some of the information you require. You asked:

Please can you provide details of past property damage to the bus shelters in the Borough of Croydon area, of which we understand there are currently 114 Bus shelters in this area.

I am seeking details of incidents in the past 5 years summarised by:

date;

type of event - e.g. vandalism / accidental or unknown cause of damage / impact damage /  weather related etc.;

approximate cost of repairs

Please can you also confirm if there have been any public liability (i.e. injury or damage to members of the public caused by the shelters) claims made (against tfl) in the last 5 years? If so, please detail each claim by :

Date;

type of event - how occurred;

cost of claim (i.e. legal costs and injury awards) etc.

We hold a maintenance report for all TfL owned bus shelters in Croydon. The report contains the date that defects were reported, requested to be repaired and completed. The cost bracket of the repair is also listed in the report. However, the cause of the damage is not logged as part of the maintenance records.

Regarding public liability claims, we don’t have a searchable tool to identify whether a claim resulted from an incident in the London Borough of Croydon. The work involved in reviewing all claims with a reference to a bus stop/shelter in the description and/or with the bus stop/shelter code, to find the location and then check if it falls within the London Borough of Croydon, would be too time consuming. The location information is usually noted in the correspondence and it is this manual work of having to read each letter of claim (and any subsequent correspondence if the location was not clear) to locate and extract those that are relevant to your request, that would be very burdensome.

Therefore, under section 12 of the FOI Act, we are not obliged to comply with your whole request because the cost of determining whether we hold the information, locating and retrieving it and extracting for the second part of your request, would exceed the appropriate limit. This is calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described. We have estimated that it would considerably exceed the cost to provide a response to your request due to the manual work involved in determining which claims were relevant to 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, the first half of your request is less likely to raise concerns about the processing time required to answer it. You may also wish to limit your request about claims to a shorter period of time.

Please note that we will not be taking further action until we receive your revised request. However, it is very likely that in your revised request we would need to consider the application of section 43(2) – commercial interests to details of each claim and amount paid in each compensation, as disclosure of this information might be commercially sensitive.

If you are considering submitting a further request please think carefully about whether the request is essential at this current time, as answering FOI/EIR 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 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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