F/O from 2111-1920 I am writing to request some information relating to the land adjoining the existing Elephant and Castle shopping centre that was vested in you under The GLA Roads and Side Roads Order (Transfer of Property etc) Order 2000. The planning application (Southwark Council ref. num. 16/AP/4458) submitted by Elephant and Castle Properties Co. Ltd. and Elephant and Castle Properties Ltd. (the 'Developers') shows two residential towers of private flats sitting on your aforementioned land. For your reference, the title numbers of these plots of land may be TGL190331, LN113754, 271661 and LN51641, and the planning application was approved by Southwark Council Planning Committee on 3 July 2018. 2) While the above is being resolved, and in line with your suggestion that the scope of the request is narrowed, I would like to request all communications between TfL and Delancey, DS2 and DP9 from pre-application stage to date with regard to this planning application.

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TfL Ref: 2334-1920

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 5 November 2019 asking for ‘all communications between TfL and Delancey, DS2 and DP9 from pre-application stage to date’ with regard to planning application (Southwark Council ref. num. 16/AP/4458) submitted by Elephant and Castle Properties Co. Ltd. and Elephant and Castle Properties Ltd.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Environmental Information Regulations and TfL’s information access policy. I can confirm we do hold some of the information you require.

We are applying Regulation 12(4)(b) to your request as we believe that the request is ‘manifestly unreasonable’ because locating, extracting and collating all the information you have requested would impose unreasonable costs on us and require an unreasonable diversion of resources.

London Borough of Southwark planning case reference 16/AP/4458 relates to a substantial redevelopment of Elephant and Castle shopping centre. There are no final agreements in place regarding the land, the wider development agreement or a valuation for the land you’ve asked about in your request for information. TfL has been negotiating a Developer Agreement with Delancey since 2015/16 in relation to the scheme at Elephant and Castle, however these negotiations are still on-going.

Unfortunately we do not archive correspondence in the way that you’ve suggested in your request, as a number of business areas and individuals will have had involvement in this project from pre application stage to date - a period of more than 3 years. Information, emails and correspondence is likely to be held electronically in personal email accounts and folders as well as in shared drives therefore the most efficient way of ensuring that we capture all the information being requested is to conduct a company wide email search using one or several key words or phrases. Each search then generates a number of ‘hits’ and we can then establish firstly whether the searches are likely to have captured all the information we hold on that topic, and secondly based on the number of hits we can reasonably estimate how long it would take a member of staff to review each of the emails (or ‘hits’) to establish whether it’s relevant to the request and then to collate those that are relevant, removing any personal information and considering any exceptions that may apply.

Following your refined request. we have conducted a few searches for completeness. The first search was for all emails to/from email accounts with suffixes of @delancey.com, @Gardiner.com, @dp9.co.uk and @ds2.co.uk since 1 October 2016 that contain any of the following keywords: “elephant and castle” “elephant & castle” “e&c” – this produced 512 hits. We then conducted a second using only the keyword "16/ap/4458" which is the Southwark Council planning reference number you cited by the which produced just 9 hits. Finally we conducted a search using the keywords: "TGL190331" "LN113754" "271661" "LN51641" which are the land plot references you cited which produced just 5 hits.

Essentially, we would have to carry out either a much broader search, potentially looking at all emails from the suffixes as above in order to collate the requested information or we have to carry out a search using much narrower parameters to get a reasonable number of hits that will definitely cover all the information you have asked for. We have already established that conducting a wider search using the key word of ‘elephant and castle’ would generate thousands or tend of thousands of hits which would impose unreasonable costs on us to review the results.

Due to the current on going negotiations and the commercial sensitivity around the proposed development, please bear in mind should you choose to submit a further request that a significant volume of material is likely to engage the commercial interests exception under EIR 2004 in any case.

The use of this exception is subject to a public interest test, which requires us to consider whether the public interest in applying the exception outweighs the public interest in disclosure. We recognise that the release of information would promote accountability and transparency in public services and also help address your particular concerns about this issue. However, the time it would take to provide the information you have requested would divert a disproportionate amount of our resources from its core functions and on balance we consider that the public interest currently favours the use of the exception.

We will consider your request again, if you are able to narrow its scope so that we can more easily locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking. You may find it more beneficial to ask specific questions based on the recorded information we hold, rather than a very broad request for correspondence which is more likely to raise concerns around the resource required to process the request, as well as incorporate information which would be likely to be of limited value.

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

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