F/on from FOI-1900 Please provide details as requested of any claims of subsidence caused by trees identified as TG1, within or close to the area of TG1. Please provide details of all claims within the last 10 years. We should be obliged if you provide us with details of each and every incident of subsidence from your records within the last 10 years. We also request a full copy of the tree maintenance records and work orders relating to these claims.

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Our ref: FOI-2072-2021/GH

Thank you for your refined request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 14 January 2021 asking for information about subsidence claims.

Your request has 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’.

As previously advised, our claims handler, Gallagher Bassett, do not record claims by geographical location, and therefore to provide information on any claims relating to these trees would not be an easy task and would require manual checks of all claims received to ascertain if they are relevant to this location. Whilst we agree the area referred to as ‘TG1’ is not large, as Gallagher Basset are not able to search for claims by geographical areas, answering your request would take an excessive amount of time.

Whilst you have now provided a time frame of 10 years for your request, on average Gallagher Basset receive circa 41 claims relating to ‘vegetation’ each year. To answer your request we would therefore need to retrieve and review approximately 410 cases over 10 years.

Each one of those will need to be manually reviewed to:

1 – ascertain if it is a tree root claim – it may be that the claim relates to a fallen tree branch that has damaged a parked car for instance.

2 - ascertain the address of the property that is the subject to the claim,

3 - checked to see whether the address falls within the area you refer to.

We estimate that this would take an average of 5 minutes a claim, which would total over 34 hours.

Were Gallagher Bassett able to identify any previous claims for subsidence in the area ‘TG1’, we would then need to use this information to carry out further searches for the ‘full copy of the tree maintenance records and work orders relating to these claims’, you have requested, which would further exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ in dealing with your request.

The other point that we would need to consider is whether the release of information relating to specific properties would be appropriate, as details of other claims would contain personal information and disclosure therefore may be a breach of GDPR.

To help bring the cost of responding to your requests within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider refining your requests to concentrate on matters which are important to you.

Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, TfL does not have to answer your question if it would require the creation of new information or the provision of a judgement, explanation, advice or opinion that was not already recorded at the time of your request. If you have specific questions relating to these topics we may be more easily able to respond to these than to a request for any information held.

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

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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