TfL Ref: FOI-2526-2425
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 6th November 2024 asking for information about Oyster cards.
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy.
Specifically you asked:
“1.Please confirm how many customers have received their deposits returned from 2014 to 2024 and the time to took TFL to refund the money
2.Please confirm how many customers have received all the credit on oyster cards from 2014 to 2024 and the time to took TFL to refund the money .
3.Please confirm how many customers have received a credit in respect the over charging payments made in error by TFL on their oyster cards from 2014 to 2024and the time to took TFL to refund the money.
4.Please confirm the damages and costs paid BY TFL since 2014 to 2024 as a result of refusing to refund deposits ands credit on oyster cards
5.Please confirm how many Oyster cards were cancelled by TFL following complaints of TFL failure to repay over charging by TFL”.
I can confirm that we hold some of the information you require. However, I am afraid that given the broad scope of the request it is not possible to provide the information within the costs limit for responding to FOI cases, as set out under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act. Under section 12, TfL is not required to provide information if it would cost more than £450 to determine if the requested information is held, and to then locate, retrieve or extract it from elsewhere. This is calculated at a rate of £25 per hour, equivalent to 18 hours work.
In this instance the exemption applies because the information has not been collated before and because there is no particularly quick or efficient way of doing so. For example, regarding your questions 1-3, colleagues in our data team believe that the information is only held for a maximum of two or three years, and have already expended a number of hours (estimated to be as much as 20) trying to source the information for a single year, with no final figures calculated. Similarly, colleagues in our Legal team have considered Question 4 (which we have interpreted as relating to formal claims taken against TfL which have either been settled or lost) and have advised that the only way of sourcing the information would be to manually review our monthly litigation reports over the past 10 years to look for any county court claims of this nature. Given this, we conclude that it is not possible to provide the requested information – so far as we hold it – within the 18 hour costs limit. Note further that the information for Question 5 is not held - if a customer surrenders their Oyster card (with a season ticket and/or Pay As You Go on it) we do not ask for or record the reasons why.
In order to bring your request within the costs limit you may wish to reframe it to narrow its scope, focussing on the information that is of most importance to you. If you are experiencing a difficulty yourself in gaining a refund from TfL then please refer this to our Customer Services team at: [email protected]
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely,
David Wells
FOI Case Officer
FOI Case Management Team
General Counsel
Transport for London
