Our Ref:        FOI-2301-2425

Thank you for your request received on 22 October 2024 asking for information about private prosecutions and railcard offences.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy. I can confirm that we hold some of the information you require. You asked for:

1)         Details on how individual court cases brought by your company in private prosecutions are stored in your database software, including column/field names, possible categories for each column/field as of October 22, 2024, and the schema of the database. Please also provide an example, censored if necessary, database entry from October 2024.

2)         Details on how each penalty fare issued by your company is stored in your database software, including column/field names, and possible categories for each column/field as of October 22, 2024, and the schema of the database. Please also provide an example, censored if necessary, database entry from October 2024.

Please see the attached word document showing the fields of our prosecution database as well as the fields of our penalty fare database. All records are kept for seven years. We have redacted any personal information.

3)         In separate spreadsheets in XLSX or ODS format, please provide the following information, broken down by year for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 to October 22. For each query please provide the number of cases brought to court in a year in the first column and the number of successful cases in a second column.

a.         Total of all private prosecution cases.

b.         Using a keyword search, private prosecutions brought by your company which contain both “Railcard” AND any form of the word “expire”, “expiry,” “expired,” etc.

c.         Private prosecutions brought by your company brought for those infringing on 16-25 and 26-30 Railcard minimum fare rules.

Please see the table below with the requested data, in answer to Q3a:

Due to the limitations of our prosecution database, we are unable to provide the data for the following requests:

b.         Using a keyword search, private prosecutions brought by your company which contain both “Railcard” AND any form of the word “expire”, “expiry,” “expired,” etc.

c.         Private prosecutions brought by your company brought for those infringing on 16-25 and 26-30 Railcard minimum fare rules.

If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for any reason, please do not hesitate to contact me.

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]