Request ID: FOI-2171-2122 Date published: 17 January 2022
You asked
F/O from 2045-2122
Thanks for this. One final question:
You mentioned a small percentage of Santander Cycles have been found outside London. Can you tell me where these have been found since the scheme launched? If that time period is too long, then just in the past five years?
We answered
TfL Ref: 2171-2122
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 22 December 2021 asking for information about missing Santander Cycles.
Your request has been considered under the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and our information access policy. You asked for the locations where Santander Cycles have been found outside London since the scheme launched / in the past five years.
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 a request if we estimate that the cost of determining whether we hold the information, and locating, 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’. This is because we would have to manually go through thousands of records one by one to identify those found outside London. We would then need to extract and collate this information; as mentioned in our previous reply, we have recovered 67,498 cycles between 2013/14 and July 2021. Even if we were to provide the information for the last five years, this would still exceed the cost limit to answer as thousands of records would still need to be reviewed.
We are able to confirm that bikes have been recovered from the following locations:
Southend
Cornwall
Brighton
Bikes in Cornwall, Brighton and Southend were recovered with the support of British Transport Police.
There have also been very rare occasions when bikes have been reported outside of the UK, this includes:
Republic of Ireland
Turkey
Gambia
Australia
Jamaica
Romania
Turkey
The bike identified in the Republic of Ireland bike was recovered with the support of the Irish Garda.
If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Sara Thomas FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
