Hi FOI team, please supply emails for the past 12 months relating to passenger congestion at Bank/Monument stations. Many thanks

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Our ref: FOI-2546-1920/GH

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 21 November 2019 asking for emails relating to passenger congestion at Bank/Monument stations.

Your request has been considered under the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and our information access policy.

I can confirm that we do hold the information you require. However, to provide 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 requests 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. In this instance, we estimate that the time required to answer your request would exceed 18 hours which, at £25 per hour (the rate stipulated by the Regulations), exceeds the ‘appropriate limit’.

You have asked for ‘emails for the past 12 months relating to passenger congestion at Bank/Monument stations’. A preliminary search of our email archive for any emails which contain the keywords “Bank” AND “Passenger Congestion” identified 8,899 emails, which would all have to be manually read to see if they were relevant to your request. Clearly this would take an excessive amount of time, and would not identify any emails which contained differing wording. For example, these would not include emails where only Monument station was mentioned, or those where descriptions such as ‘overcrowding’ or ‘busy’ were used.

To help bring the cost of responding to your requests within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider refining your requests to concentrate on matters which are important to you. For example you may find it more beneficial to ask specific questions or request specific reports which are less likely to lead to such a significant volume of information requiring review in order to collate the information that is relevant to your request.

Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, TfL does not have to answer your question if it would require the creation of new information or the provision of a judgement, explanation, advice or opinion that was not already recorded at the time of your request. If you have specific questions relating to this topic we may be more easily able to respond to these than to a request for all emails held.

If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Graham Hurt

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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