Dear TfL. Can you please provide the following under an FOI request: Please provide the number of emails TFL have that reference ARUP and UBER in the same email. I do not with you to send me the actual emails, however I do want you to break the numbers down into 3 month periods... So the request is: Number of emails that reference Uber & Arup in the same email between the following dates: Jan 2012-March 2012. April 2012-June 2012. July 2012-Sept 2012. Oct 2012-Dec 2012. Jan 2013-March 2013 April 2013-June 2013 July 2013-Sept 2013. Oct 2013-Dec 2013. Jan 2014-March2014 April2014-June 2014 July 2014-Sept 2014 Oct 2014-Dec 2014 Jan 2015-March 2015 April 2015-June 2015 July 2015-Sept 2015. Oct 2015-Dec 2015. Jan 2016-March 2016 April 2016-June 2016 July 2016-Sept 2016 Oct 2016-Dec 2016 Jan 2017-March 2017 April 2017- July 2017.

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TfL Ref: 2228-1718

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 11 November 2017 asking for information about numbers of emails that reference ARUP and UBER in the same email for various periods of time.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. I can confirm we do hold the information you require.  However, we are refusing your request under section 14(1) of the Act.

After reviewing your request and deciding how to retrieve and extract the information you have requested,  we consider that providing the requested information would place an unreasonable burden on us. Our principal duty is to provide an effective transport service for London and we consider that answering this request would represent a disproportionate effort. It would be a significant distraction from our work managing the TfL network, requiring re-allocation of already limited resources and placing an unacceptable burden on a small number of personnel.

Our email search facility (Discovery Accelerator) is only available to a very limited number of individuals within the organisation, only one of whom works within the FOI Case Management Team. Where requests for ‘all emails held by TfL’ are received, the process of searching in excess of 100,000 mailboxes using Discovery Accelerator take approximately three days to complete per search and, whilst that search is in progress, it is not possible to conduct any other archived email searches due to limited capability of the system.

As you are probably aware, a search across the entirety of this time period produced in excess of 50,000 emails. However, it is not possible to export such a large volume of emails into a format that allows us to sort, review and tally according to time periods in one go. For us to process your request, it would be necessary to conduct at least twelve individual company wide searches (one for each six month period) but it is likely that we would actually need to conduct several more because of the volumes of results that we know will be produced. The results of these larger searches will likely be split across multiple condensed data files which would then make it impossible to tally numbers reliably for each quarterly period because emails within chains will be duplicated across the different exported data files.

Given the request is solely for numbers of emails in various quarterly periods, a total number for which you are already aware, we feel this non-specific request will be of limited value and little wider public interest. We therefore consider the burden of collating the requested information would be disproportionate to the benefit of providing it. Therefore, we are refusing it under s.14 of the FOI Act.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Sara Thomas

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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