How much money has been spent on the promotion and submission of planning applications within Commercial Development (commercial / residential schemes)? > This should also include (but not limited to): > - planning fees (including pre-app, application, revisions, resubmissions) > - professional consultant fees (such as heritage, community engagement) > - costs associated with aborted / failed planning applications NB This should not include anything which is solely related to operational needs. It should relate to all planning applications since May 2016.

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TfL Ref: FOI-2107-2021

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 19 January 2021, asking for information about planning applications within TfL’s Commercial Development directorate.

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 hold some of the information you require.

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.

Our Commercial Development directorate spent approximately £48m across over 107 commercial and residential projects since 2016/17 but this figure may contain other costs, such as legal fees etc. This expenditure has helped generated additional revenues for TfL, which more than covered the outgoing costs.

However, in order to extract the amount spent on planning and consultancy fees and on costs associated with aborted / failed planning applications, someone would have to manually review each individual project in the system which would be very time consuming. We estimate it would take approximately 3 hours per project to review, extract and collate the required data and therefore the cost of providing a response to your request would exceed the above quoted cost limit. In addition, the description of the costs may be limited as it is dependent on what people record and may not be exactly accurate.

To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider narrowing its scope so that we can more easily locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking. You might consider limiting your request to a shorter period of time or specific projects within Commercial Development.

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.

Please note that we will not be taking further action until we receive your revised request. However, if you are considering submitting a further request please think carefully about whether the request is essential at this current time, as answering FOI/EIR 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.

Yours sincerely

Eva Hextall

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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