Dear Sir or Madam, Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 I seek the following information: All correspondence, including emails, received and sent by TfL employees in the Surface Transport department with a subject heading that includes the words “Rotherhithe Bridge” or “Rotherhithe-Canary Wharf Crossing” or “Rotherhithe to Canary Wharf” in the last three months and any other correspondence, including emails with those headings, that are available for the years 2016 and 2017. If that search is too wide please limit the search to people working for "New River Crossings”, if that constitutes a separate department, or emails to/from Leon Daniels with those headings and in that time frame. Please let me know if this is the case. If the decision is made to withhold some of this data using exemptions in the Data Protection Act, please inform me of that fact and cite the exemptions used. If some parts of this request are easier to answer than others, I would ask that you release the available data as soon as possible. If you need any clarification then please do not hesitate to contact me. Under Section 16 it is your duty to provide advice and assistance and so I would expect you to contact me if you find this request unmanageable in any way. I would be grateful if you could confirm in writing that you have received this request, and I look forward to hearing from you within the 20-working day statutory time period.

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TfL Ref: 2074-1718

Thank you for your revised request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 2 November 2017 asking for information about the Rotherhithe Crossing.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. I can confirm we do hold the information you require.

However, we are refusing your request under section 14(1) of the Act. After reviewing a sample of our records we consider that providing the requested information would place an unreasonable burden on us. Our principal duty is to provide an effective transport service for London and we consider that answering this request would represent a disproportionate effort. It would be a significant distraction from our work managing the TfL network, requiring re-allocation of already limited resources and placing an unacceptable burden on a small number of personnel. We do wish to clarify that whilst we consider that your request falls under section 14(1) of the FOI Act, this does not reflect a conclusion that it has been your intention to deliberately place an undue burden on our resources.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) guidance states that one of the indicators of a request which may fall under section 14(1) is that it “appears to be part of a completely random approach, lacks any clear focus, or seems to have been solely designed for the purpose of ‘fishing’ for information without any idea of what might be revealed.”

The ICO guidance provides the following examples of a ‘fishing expedition’ request which may fall under section 14(1) if it:

- Imposes a burden by obliging the authority to sift through a substantial volume of information to isolate and extract the relevant details;

- Encompasses information which is only of limited value because of the wide scope of the request;

- Creates a burden by requiring the authority to spend a considerable amount of time considering any exemptions and redactions.

Our view is that all three of these examples apply in this instance. Your request covers every instance of an email being sent or received by a TfL employee across a period of almost 2 years that contain three word combinations but all containing the keywords “Rotherhithe Bridge” or “Rotherhithe-Canary Wharf Crossing”  or “Rotherhithe to Canary Wharf”.  We conducted a remote search using the parameters you provided and this produced over 218,000 hits. A brief review of these results show that, as well as significant volumes of duplication, the majority of the emails are likely to be unrelated to the proposed Rotherhithe Crossing and would relate to other transport modes for example London Overground station, buses and other passenger information that just happen to contain the keywords specified.

Searching through such a significant volume of emails to collate them would be a significant task. Given the nature of correspondence, it is likely that it would be necessary to spend a significant amount of time considering exemptions which might be applicable to the information caught by the request for example personal data, or information which we may not be able to disclose due to the current consultation.

We consider the burden of retrieving, reviewing and redacting the information would be disproportionate to the benefit of providing it. Therefore, due to the wide and unfocused scope of your request, we are refusing it under s.14 of the FOI Act. If you would like to re-submit a more focused, specific request then we will, of course, consider it. For example, a request for information on a particular, specific subject or aspect of the project contained in correspondence exchanged between named individuals over a limited period of time is less likely to raise concerns about the disproportionate effort required to answer it.

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

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