TfL Ref: 2518-1718

Thank you for your email received by us on 1 December 2017 asking for information about our advertising income from disposable single use plastic bottle items including bottled water and soft drinks over the last three financial years.

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

Further to my previous email of 3 January 2018 advising of the consideration of section 43 (2) – prejudice to commercial interests, I can advise that the specific rates applied to each advert are the result of negotiation, and the disclosure of rates negotiated with individual parties would prejudice our negotiation of rates with subsequent advertisers. Whilst it is likely that this exemption would apply to individual campaign rates we initially underestimated the amount of time it would take to identify each and every product that used single use plastic bottles. Neither we nor our commercial partner Exterion hold enough information to determine whether the products advertised on the transport network involve a single use plastic bottle, regardless of product, without quite extensive research, particularly as many products are available in different containers, such as aluminium cans and glass bottles. We have some 36,000 adverts posted every two weeks across the network and therefore to identify and review the packaging options for all such products advertised over three years 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.

However, information on the contracts that we have relating to promotions run with Lucozade and Danone are published here on our website via the following link: https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/publications-and-reports/contracts#on-this-page-15

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 as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.

Yours sincerely

Jasmine Howard
FOI Case Officer
Information Governance
Transport For London