Complaints about the withdrawal of the Day Travelcard
Request ID: FOI-2232-2324 Date published: 12 October 2023
You asked
Dear Transport for London
I'm writing to make a revised freedom of information request about the withdrawal of the Day Travelcards.
The reference to my failed FOI request is linked below.
https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transparency/freedom-of-information/foi-request-detail?referenceId=FOI-1792-2324
After the engagement closed on 6 June 2023. Would you be able to reveal the number of complaints and objections about the withdrawal of the Day Travelcards? The date range starts from 7 June 2023 to the present day.
Can you publish the documents (such as action plan, business case etc.) relating to the withdrawal of the Day Travelcards?
We answered
Our ref: FOI-2232-2324/GH
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 25 September 2023 asking for information about complaints about the withdrawal of the Day Travelcard.
Due to requirements of the government’s funding settlements for TfL to save money and generate significant amounts of additional revenue, we have had to consider proposals to stop accepting Day Travelcards on the TfL network.
After careful consideration of the proposal, taking into account the requirements of TfL’s funding settlement and TfL’s Equality Impact Assessment (EqIA), in July of this year the Mayor reluctantly instructed TfL to give the required minimum six months’ notice to withdraw from the relevant provisions of the Travelcard agreement. The publication of the Mayoral Decision, including the Equality Impact Assessment (EqIA), is available at https://www.london.gov.uk/md3142-withdrawal-day-travelcards-tfl-network While this six-month notice-period is now underway, this decision remains reversable and does not therefore mean that Day Travelcards will be withdrawn. TfL is working collaboratively with the DfT and Rail Delivery Group to discuss options that would allow Day Travelcards to continue to be provided, while ensuring TfL can meet the requirements of the funding settlement with Government.
There are no changes to tickets at this time and the existing daily pay as you go caps on contactless or Oyster, which are used by the overwhelming majority of those travelling, will not be affected by this.
Your specific request regarding the number of complaints and objections received, 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 still 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’.
To explain further, we do not have a reporting category on the ‘withdrawal of the Day Travelcards’, and we are therefore unable to readily identify any complaints specifically about this issue. For your original request, we therefore carried out a search of our customer relationship database for a combination of the following carefully chosen keywords.
Day Travelcard Day Travel card Daily Travelcard Daily Travel card Withdraw
For the period 06/06/2023 up until 06/09/2023, (the date we ran the data), this identified 2149 cases. Whilst the majority of these cases probably are not relevant to the withdrawal of the Day Travelcards, we would have had to manually read each one to see whether it was relevant to your request. We estimated it would around 4 minutes to locate & read each one. This would have taken over 140 hours, and therefore your request was refused on cost grounds.
You have now requested the number of complaints received since 6 June to the time of your request (25 September). A further report was run using the keywords as above, from 7 September – 3 October, and this resulted in a further 640 cases to manually check – this would be in addition to the 2149 previously identified, and therefore your current request would actually take longer to answer than your original one.
To try to assist you in some way, we have run a further search for the Travelcard keywords but which all contained the word ‘withdraw’. This has resulted in identifying 55 complaints, although due to the search terms explained above, it is unlikely that this has identified all complaints/objections received.
If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for some reason, please do not hesitate to contact me.
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
