Request ID: FOI-1910-2223 Date published: 23 November 2022
You asked
Dear sir or madam,
Please provide your policy and guidance on resolving situations wherein customers have been greatly inconvenienced by improperly being refused carriage by undignifiedly incompetent station staff due to such staff's stubborn refusal to correctly understand the codified TfL conditions of carriage.
Please disclose any policies with respect to pecuniary compensation for customers' indignity in being incorrectly refused carriage by TfL despite contributing to its funding as a public service by taxes.
Please provide tallies and statistics as may be available of cases where customers have been financially compensated for mistreatment by TfL staff and particularly improper refusal of carriage due to staff incompetence.
We answered
TfL Ref: 1910-2223
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 4 November 2022 asking for information about our customer services.
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy. I can confirm we do hold some of the information you require. You asked: Please provide your policy and guidance on resolving situations wherein customers have been greatly inconvenienced by improperly being refused carriage by undignifiedly incompetent station staff due to such staff's stubborn refusal to correctly understand the codified TfL conditions of carriage.
Please disclose any policies with respect to pecuniary compensation for customers' indignity in being incorrectly refused carriage by TfL despite contributing to its funding as a public service by taxes.
Please provide tallies and statistics as may be available of cases where customers have been financially compensated for mistreatment by TfL staff and particularly improper refusal of carriage due to staff incompetence.
We do not have a policy covering the specific situations you have asked about. Gesture of goodwill payments are made on a case by case basis. We do publish our complaints handling procedure on our website which is available at the following link: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-complaints-handling-procedure.pdf.
With regard to the part of your request where you ask for statistics around customer compensation for complaints about staff and refusal of carriage, (noting that no time period has been specified) unfortunately, 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 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.It would significantly exceed the cost limit to provide a response to your current request.
To explain further, we would record refunds of the nature you’ve asked about under the generic category of ‘Goodwill’ - this same category would also contain complaints about a very broad variety of situations which resulted in a goodwill payment being made to a customer including all entry and exit refunds, staff and customer error, refusal of travel and missed touches. It would significantly exceed the cost limit to filter out the complaint type you have asked about and to extract this data. This is because that process would involve us reviewing all complaints / refunds made in this category to see if any of those logged on our complaints database matched those you’ve specifically asked about. Therefore we are unable to provide the specific information you have requested without manually reviewing thousands of complaints that we have recorded on our database that relate to goodwill and then extract and collate those that are relevant to your request. It is also likely that some of the complaint details wouldn’t be recorded on our database and therefore we would not be able to ascertain in all cases why a goodwill payment had been made.
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 Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
