money spent on salary, overtime, payments for TfL ambassadors since October 2022
Request ID: FOI-2248-2324 Date published: 18 October 2023
You asked
Dear FOI
Formally under the usual timescales and legislation in regards to FOI
London Underground / TFL Licenced Ambassadors and London Underground / TFL unlicensed ambassadors
How much money , in total, Gross , have London Underground and / or TFL spent on salary / overtime and extra payments for London Underground/ TFL unlicensed and licenced ambassadors since October 2022 . To be clear , i am not asking for any individuals salary nor who they are nor what their substantive job role is
If needs be I will break down this FOI into 12 Separate FOI on a month by month basis
We answered
TfL Ref: 2248-2324 2249-2324 and 2250-2324
Thank you for your three requests received by Transport for London (TfL) on 26 September 2023 asking for information about TfL Ambassadors and London Underground staff overtime costs.
Your requests have been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. I can confirm we hold the information you require.
However, in accordance with 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, locating and retrieving it and extracting it from other information would exceed the appropriate limit. This is calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described. Under Regulation 5(2) of the Data Protection and Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004, we are permitted to aggregate requests where they relate to any extent to the same or similar information and this aggregation applies to any requests that are received within a sixty working day period, including individuals considered to be acting in concert (including pseudonyms).
We consider that the aggregate cost of complying with your three FOI requests referred to above would considerably exceed the cost limit, therefore we are refusing the requests.
To explain further, and with specific reference to request reference 2249-2324 where you have asked for the total hours worked by Underground/ TFL unlicensed and licenced ambassadors at LUL stations since October 2022, in order for us to provide this data, we would need to manually review every Ambassador shift undertaken since October 2022 and count / add together the length of every individual shift as this information is not collated centrally. Shifts vary in length and there have been thousands of shifts over the period covered by your request, and therefore in order to undertake this work the cost limit for this request alone would be greatly exceeded. The cost would be further exceeded by us trying to answer the other two requests you have made.
To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to prioritise the information you are most interested in and make a single request, rather than several requests in a short period of time in order to make the best use of the processing time available to you under the FOI Act. We would for example, be able to answer a refined request asking for the total number of shifts worked by Non-licensed and Licensed Ambassadors as this data is more readily available.
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
