Our Ref:         FOI-2209-1920

Thank you for your request received on 23 October 2019 asking for information about incidents of passengers being struck by London Underground trains.

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’.

You have requested "Person Under a Train" incidents on London Underground for an 18 year period. During this time period different systems have been in use for recording service delays and incidents involving passengers. Previously we have identified in excess of 450 incidents for the last ten year period, all of which would need to be manually reviewed in order to extract and collate those that indicate whether the incident resulted in a fatality (our records only apply to the status recorded at the scene). We conservatively estimate that it would take on average five minutes to review the records held and compare the records on each system in order to locate, extract and collate the information you have requested. It would therefore take in excess of 35 hours to provide you with the information requested and therefore exceed the cost limit.

We have dealt with previous requests on this topic that might assist you with your queries or help focus your request:

https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transparency/freedom-of-information/foi-request-detail?referenceId=FOI-3148-1819
https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transparency/freedom-of-information/foi-request-detail?referenceId=FOI-3023-1819
https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transparency/freedom-of-information/foi-request-detail?referenceId=FOI-2333-1819
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/summary_of_persons_under_trains_2#incoming-1441714

To help bring the cost of responding to your requests within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider refining your requests to concentrate on matters which are important to you. For example, we believe we would be able to provide the information and detail requested for a shorter time period, for example for a two year period.

If you are not satisfied with this response 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

[email protected]