Could you please provide a breakdown of the 10 Tube stations that faced the highest number of station closures since the beginning of the year, due to overcrowding, and the specific number of times each were shut during the period? Thanks

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TfL Ref: FOI-2462-1718

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 28 November 2017 asking for information about station closures.

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.

Unfortunately, to provide all of the information you have requested would 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 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.

We have interpreted your request to be in relation to ‘full station closures’. This is where no trains are stopping at the station, therefore, passengers are unable to get off the train or enter, exit the station for a duration of time. There may be specific times where we would close a platform or part of the station but still allow access and egress for customers. London Underground do not generally close stations due to overcrowding, we use station control to prevent overcrowding so we can keep our customers safe, and therefore we expect the number of full station closures due to overcrowding will be extremely low (and possibly zero).

However, we do not have a central record of this information and so we would need to check each station individually and then tally up any closures that meet the requirements of your request in order to compile a list of the ten stations with the highest number of closures. We estimate that this process of locating, extracting and collating the relevant information will exceed the cost limit.

To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider narrowing its scope so that we can more easily locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking. For example, there are times where the gateline will be closed for a period of time to mitigate against overcrowding which could be deemed as a station closure from a customer perspective as they are unable to access the station. You may therefore wish to focus your request on gateline closures due to overcrowding, rather than full station closures, and then choose ten specific stations that you are interested in and we should then be able to process this within the cost limit.

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

Yours sincerely

Lee Hill

Senior FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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