Environmental Information Regulations Request I request all communications held from 2012 between TfL, the GLA, London Borough of Lambeth and Department of Transport which concern potentially constructing a station & connecting to the London Overground in central Brixton. I have seen the 2014 Steer Davies Greave report which was a consultants' report about this. It should be on lambeth.gov.uk and is also on: yumpu.com. There may be also communications involving a later consultants' report by Mott MacDonald on LBL website, but I request all communications also with LBL's consultants and TfL and agencies referred to.

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TfL Ref: EIR-2068-2021

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 14^th January 2021 asking for information about a potential London Overground and Brixton central connection.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Environmental Information Regulations and our information access policy.

You asked:

“I request all communications held from 2012 between TfL, the GLA, London Borough of Lambeth and Department of Transport which concern potentially constructing a station & connecting to the London Overground in central Brixton. I have seen the 2014 Steer Davies Greave report which was a consultants' report about this. It should be on lambeth.gov.uk and is also on: yumpu.com. There may be also communications involving a later consultants' report by Mott MacDonald on LBL website, but I request all communications also with LBL's consultants and TfL and agencies referred to.”

I can confirm that we hold the information you require. However, to source it all would require a disproportionate amount of effort on our part and therefore your request is being refused under regulation 12(4)(b) of the Environmental Information Regulations, which applies where it would be “manifestly unreasonable” to comply. In this case the exception applies not because of the amount of material that we believe exists (which we estimate is relatively minimal) but because there is no easy or efficient way of finding it. While we can run automated searches for historic emails, running such searches using the keywords “Brixton” and “Overground” combined yields over 1000 returns for the period in question. A separate search for “East Brixton” returned a further 355 results. The only way to determine which of these emails are specifically about a proposed Overground connection at Brixton would be for us to source and review them all. Even if this could be achieved at a non-stop rate of one email every two minutes, this would require over 45 hours work. We do not believe this is a proportionate or reasonable use of our resource, and we see no wider public interest in complying with the request. Therefore, in this instance, we believe the greater public interest lies in favour of applying the exception in order to protect TfL resource - which is largely paid for from the public via fares and taxes in the form of grant money.

Notwithstanding the above, our Public Transport Service Planning team advise there has been relatively little discussion of this project over the period in question. We are aware that there was a Brixton East study carried out in 2016, led by the London Borough of Lambeth, but TfL did not receive the output of that work. We cannot find any references to a report by Mott McDonald on this. It is suggested that as Lambeth led on the development of the business case for this proposal then it will likely be the body that holds the most information that would be of interest to you, and so you may want to send a request to them if you have not already done so. Requests to Lambeth can be made via its website here

https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/forms/foi-or-eir-request-form

If you are considering submitting a further request to TfL please think carefully about whether the request is essential at this current time, as answering information 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 as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.

Yours sincerely,

David Wells

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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