Request ID: FOI-2163-2223 Date published: 23 December 2022
You asked
I would like to make an FOI request for the following
Details of all contracts for service quality monitoring on all TFL services including Bus, Rail, Underground, DLR, and Riverbus services, including covering customer experience, punctuality, and driver technical assessments for Bus - including current contract holders, renewal dates, contract specifications, and successful bids by the current contract holders
We answered
Our ref: FOI-2163-2223/GH
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 27 November 2022 asking for information about contracts for service quality monitoring.
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’.
Your request in its current format is extremely broad, as you ask for ‘Details of all contracts for service quality monitoring on all TFL services’. We do not know what specific information you require when you ask for ‘details’, but this is clearly a broad request as you have gone on to say the requested information should ‘include’ customer experience, punctuality, and driver technical assessments for Bus - including current contract holders, renewal dates, contract specifications, and successful bids by the current contract holders.
Service quality monitoring is carried out both ‘in-house’ and using external companies. For buses alone service quality monitoring is carried out in various ways, including Mileage (volume) and reliability, Driver Quality Monitoring, Engineering Quality Monitoring, Customer Experience Surveys, Customer Satisfaction Surveys etc. Providing details relating to all contracts, for all TfL services, would clearly take an excessive amount of time to identify and collate. However, contracts over £5k are published on the TfL website here – you can therefore carry out a ‘find’ search using the word, “monitoring” to see appropriate contracts.
To help bring the cost of responding to your request 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 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
