FOI request detail

Suspension of 'see their side' road safety video campaign

Request ID: FOI-1961-2122
Date published: 23 December 2021

You asked

Today the Walking & Cycling Commissioner announced the suspension of the 'see their side' campaign in a tweet. https://twitter.com/willnorman/status/1465991490136686606 Please can I have the following information (if any of these questions would cause the whole request to be refused, please consider the rest of the request separately to the original timeframe but please inform me of the partial rejection when you make that decision): 1. A breakdown of feedback received including how many positive, how many negative, how many neutral. 2. Copies of internal electronic communication with officers, staff, contractors, representatives, and others after the launch of the campaign (in a PDF document), including communication leading up to the decision to suspend the campaign. 3. Copies of electronic communication with the ad agency in the period leading up to the campaign's suspension. 4. Whether TfL will recover any money from the campaign due to the decision to suspend.

We answered

Our ref: FOI-1961-2122/GH & FOI-1972-2122/GH
 
Thank you for your requests received by Transport for London (TfL) on 26 November and 1 December 2021 asking for information about the ‘See their side' road safety video campaign.
 
Your requests have been considered under the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and our information access policy.
 
I can confirm that we do hold the information you require. However, 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 requests 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. In this instance, we estimate that the time required to answer your request would exceed 18 hours which, at £25 per hour (the rate stipulated by the Regulations), exceeds the ‘appropriate limit’. Additionally in such circumstances as may be prescribed, where two or more requests for information are made to a public authority within a consecutive 60 working day period-
 
(a) by one person, or
(b) by different persons who appear to the public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign,
 
the estimated cost of complying with any of the requests is to be taken to be the estimated total cost of complying with all of them and therefore we have aggregated your requests.
 
To explain further, question 4 of your second request asks for ‘all internal electronic communication (e.g. emails) pertaining to this campaign?’. We have carried out an email search for key staff members who were involved in this campaign since its inception in 2019, using keywords associated with Vision Zero Culture. This search resulted in almost 2000 ‘hits’. A further search of the email accounts of these same staff members using the keyword ‘See Their Side’ produced 426 hits. Each ‘hit’ is a single email, although that email will often consist of a chain of emails containing the search term at least once. To answer this question, each of these hits would need to be manually reviewed to see if they were in fact relevant to your request and then extract and compile those that are relevant. For such a large number of results, this process would exceed the cost limit explained above.
 
Furthermore, it is highly likely that other relevant emails are held involving other members of staff or using other keywords not included in this initial search, and therefore the emails obtained from the searches carried out are unlikely to capture everything. Therefore, it is clear we would need to expand our searches to include less specific keywords which would broaden this number further. Given that this is just one of 9 questions that you have raised, the cost limit will be considerably exceeded across these requests. Similarly, we are unable to conduct searches for emails to/from ‘external stakeholders’. The limitations of our search tool mean that we would need to search for all emails (internal and external) and then manually review the results to determine which of those relate to external stakeholders and then extract and collate accordingly. 
 
To help bring the cost of responding to your requests within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider refining your request to prioritise specific questions that are of most interest to you. Please be aware that, due to their nature, requests for copies of ‘all communications’ are often much more likely to breach the cost limit due to their non-specific nature. We would encourage you to focus your request on specific questions, reports or other recorded documentation to make the best use of FOI. If you were to submit a further request for emails this would need to be far more targeted and specific to ensure that we are able to process this within the cost limit detailed above.
 
If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
 
Yours sincerely
 
Graham Hurt
FOI Case Officer
FOI Case Management Team
General Counsel
Transport for London

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