Correspondence Regarding funding Transport projects
Request ID: FOI-2170-2122 Date published: 14 January 2022
You asked
All correspondence between (a) Andrew Gilligan and members of Active Travel Oversight Group, (b) Andrew Gilligan and staff and/or board representatives at Transport for London, including Will Norman, (c) members of ATOG and staff and/or board representatives at Transport for London, including Will Norman, (d) between members of ATOG, and (e) between staff and/or board representatives at Transport for London.
Correspondence should include emails, minutes from meetings and messages exchanged that relate specifically to funding Transport projects, including Active Travel schemes, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, between 01/05/2021 and 14/12/2021.
We answered
Our Ref: FOI-2170-2122
Thank you for your request received on 16 December 2021 asking for correspondence regarding transport project funding.
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy.
Unfortunately, to provide the information you with the additional correspondence 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.
We have estimated that it would cost in excess of £450 to provide a response to your current request. This is because it is estimated that it would take over 18 working hours to retrieve and compile the information you have requested.
When requests for email correspondence are received the FOI Case Management team are able to conduct a companywide email searches using keywords, dates and email addresses. The more specific a requester can be as to what they are looking for, the more we can narrow the search and therefore stand a better chance of a more relevant or focused result. A search will then return an amount of ‘hits’ which potentially contain information relating to the search terms used. Each ‘hit’ is a single email, although that email will often consist of a chain of emails containing the search term at least once.
We have done an initial search for all emails held by TfL within the specified timeframe for all emails containing the keywords “RBKC” and “funding” and this has returned over 100,000 hits. This would undoubtedly include a number duplicates, as well as emails not caught by the request. However, we would still need to manually review all of the emails identified by the search in order to extract and collate the relevant emails. It is also apparent that not all of the relevant emails covered by your request would be caught by this specific search and so the volume of material requiring review would increase further. Please note that we are not able to carry out a remote search on Board Member emails as they do not use TfL email addresses.
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. By their nature, emails contain a significant amount of personal data such as phone numbers and email addresses and so, whilst this process of redaction does not feature as part of our considerations on whether the cost limit might apply, the burden created by non-specific requests for emails is significant and this should be borne in mind before submitting requests of this nature.
The Information Commissioner describes such requests as “fishing expeditions” as the requesters “have no idea what information, if any, will be caught by the request”. Such requests are likely to be vexatious if they:
• Impose a burden by obliging the authority to sift through a substantial volume of information to isolate and extract the relevant details; • Encompass information which is only of limited value because of the wide scope of the request; • Create a burden by requiring the authority to spend a considerable amount of time considering any exemptions and redactions; • Be part of a pattern of persistent fishing expeditions by the same requester.
We therefore strongly recommend you outline, as clearly and concisely as possible, precisely the information and types of document you require. Requests that lack a clear focus are more likely to lead to concerns about the processing time required to meet our obligations under the FOI Act. Please note that we will not be processing your request until we have received suitable clarification of the information you require.
Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, we do 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.
In the meantime, if you have any queries or would like to discuss your request, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Gemma Jacob Senior FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
