Our Ref:         FOI-2503-1920

Thank you for your request received on 15 November 2019 asking for information about air quality in relation to Crossrail.

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

However, given the extent of the information you are looking for, we are applying Regulation 12(4)(b) as we believe that the request is ‘manifestly unreasonable’ because providing the information you have requested would impose unreasonable costs on us and require an unreasonable diversion of resources.

To answer your current request would take an excessive amount of staff time and resources.

1.    Any surveys or reports conducted by or on behalf of Crossrail regarding air quality and or environmental health at any/ all Crossrail sites conducted between 1 January 2014 and 1 November 2019 inclusive
2.    Any supplementary information appended to these reports

We have environmental air quality information from monitors located principally at the site boundaries of all our construction sites. This information would need to be compiled for every contractor at every site, and the current request covers a period of almost six years. If this is the information you require, if you could please specify if there is a particular site you would like this information for as well as a narrower timeframe.

3.    Any emails to and from Sir Terry Morgan, Andrew Wolstenholme, Simon Wright, and Matthew Duncan with 'air quality' and/or 'Institute of Occupational Medicine' and or 'IOM' in the subject heading or main body of the email between 1 January 2014 and 1 November 2016.

When requests for email correspondence are received the FOI Case Management team may use a search tool called Discovery Accelerator. This allows us to conduct company wide email searches using keywords, dates and email addresses. The more specific a requester can be as to what they are looking for, the more we can narrow the search and therefore stand a better chance of a more relevant or focused result. A search will then return an amount of ‘hits’ which potentially contain information relating to the search terms used. Each ‘hit’ is a single email, although that email will often consist of a chain of emails containing the search term at least once.

We have done an initial search for all emails held by TfL sent/received by the email accounts you have identified containing the terms provided, and this has returned 1278 hits. We have also done a separate search of just Sir Terry Morgan’s account, and this resulted in 486 hits. This number would most likely include duplicates. However, we would still need to manually review all of the emails identified by the search in order to extract and collate the relevant emails.

To help bring the time taken to respond to your request, you may wish to consider narrowing its scope further. If there are any additional keywords that you would like us to search for this would allow us to do a more targeted search, or you may wish to narrow the timeframe of the request.

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. If you have specific questions we will be happy to consider those.

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]