F/on from IRV-064-1920 Due to the time limitations, could you please let me know the number of partial closures at Canada Water between 1st January 2019 and 30th June 2019. (Date, times of restriction, time of reopening, reason if known). I am interested in incidents when all the gateline entrances were closed to prevent people entering.

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Our ref: FOI-2221-1920/GH

Thank you for your refined request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 22 October 2019 asking for information concerning incidents when all the gateline entrances were closed at Canada Water between 1st January 2019 and 30th June 2019.

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.

In response to your new request, a search of the system that holds Emergency Incident Report Form (EIRF) reports was carried out. As previously explained these reports are used to record a variety of incidents, including when entry gates have been reduced or closed in order to slow the flow of people into the station. This search returned a ‘hit’ total of 249 reports for the revised time period of 1 January 2019 – 30 June 2019 that you have specified. Not all of these reports will contain information that falls with the scope of your request. To accurately ensure we are providing the correct information a member of staff would have to manually review each of these reports to extract and collate those that are relevant to your request. We have reviewed a sample of these EIRFs and estimate that it would take approximately 5 minutes per report to review and extract the relevant information. This would unfortunately still exceed the appropriate cost limit for responding to Freedom of Information requests, but again would still not include records that may be held at a local level in station log books.

In order to offer as much assistance as possible, we have carried out a word search on the 249 reports, which identified the freetext descriptions of incidents which included the words ‘Crowd Control’, ‘Congestion’ or ‘Crowding’. This identified 27 reports which contained these key words, however it is possible that other relevant incidents did occur but were recorded using different wording.

We have manually reviewed these 27 reports and these showed three incidents which involved a full closure of all the gateline entrances to prevent people entering. (Please note these are incidents where all gates were closed at some point – the full closure was not in place for the entire duration shown).

12/03/19  07:08 Overcrowding. Jubilee line suspension between London Bridge & Green Park led to severe delays & gaps in service. Gates and escalator closures in place to prevent overcrowding.  Normal gateline configuration resumed at 09:40.

28/04/19  11:45 – 14:00 Crowd control measures in place for London Marathon traffic exiting and entering.

25/05/19  06:45  Jubilee line suspended Waterloo to Finchley Road due to track failure.  09:41 Gateline returned to normal configuration.

Whilst it is possible that there may well have been other instances of full gate line closures where the incident report did not happen to feature any of the above three keywords, the incidents shown above are the extent that we are able to identify within acceptable time limit constraints. You are of course welcome to resubmit a revised request, narrowing the timeframe further in order to ensure the processing time falls below the cost limit but we hope this information will be of use to you.

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

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