Request ID: FOI-2127-2122 Date published: 11 January 2022
You asked
Please could I request copies of internal delay reports and associated documentation for incidents on the Jubilee Line between 1st November 2021 and 30th November 2021.
I consider this request similar in nature to request TfL Ref: FOI-3581-1819
We answered
TfL Ref: FOI-2127-2122
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 13 December 2021, asking for reports and associated documents for incidents on the Jubilee Line between 1 November 2021 and 30 November 2021.
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 do hold the information you require.
However, we are refusing your request under section 14(1) of the Act. There are hundreds of pages of incident reports on the line for the dates in question, all of which would need to be reviewed for the purposes of your request given that there will be personal information and the use of acronyms which would need to be redacted and explained respectively, some of the descriptions will also need to be summarised as they go into great detail. As these reports are created for operational purposes, a substantial amount of work will need to be undertaken for these reports to be devised in a format suitable for public disclosure.
As mentioned above, the reports have personal data and may contain security information which would have to be removed prior to disclosure. This could only be identified by someone having to scrutinise each record to locate any sensitive information. This would clearly impose a significant burden on TfL in terms of staff time and resources. Further to this, we are not even sure if this would entirely cover the ‘associated documents’ that you also asked for, so it may be that we’d need to review even more material.
In light of the above, we consider your request lacks serious purpose or value and requesting every incident report and associated documents for a month places 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 the particular team that manages and processes requests for the radio recordings. 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.
We consider the burden of retrieving and supplying the data would be disproportionate to the benefit of providing it. If you would like to re-submit a more specific request then we will, of course, consider it. For example, if you require simple incident data or details of a specific incident we could give that.