Request ID: FOI-2592-2425 Date published: 27 November 2024
You asked
Follow-up to FOI-2347-2425:
Dear TFL
Thanks for your email.
I have some follow up questions.
Question 2: Is employee assault of another employee a serious breach of TFL policies and procedures?
Answer: To ascertain the whether a breach has occurred and the extent, a full, fair and thorough investigation would need to be conducted into the matter/incident.
Further Question: You have not answered the question asked. Can you confirm if employee assault of another employee is a serious breach of TFL policies and procedures? A simple yes or no would suffice.
and
Question 14: How many cases of gross misconduct involving assault and/or battery between employees have been recorded in the past five years?
And;
Question 15: Of these cases, how many resulted in dismissal?
And;
Question 16: How many cases of falsification or dishonesty in relation to a misconduct investigation were discovered in the past five years? What were the outcomes of these cases?
Answer: I am afraid it is not possible to source this information within the costs limit for responding to FOI cases, as set out under section 12 of the FOI Act. Under section 12, TfL is not obliged 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 costs limit applies because the information has not been collated before and there is no quick, efficient or automated way of doing so. Rather, in order to obtain the information you have requested, we would have to manually review all disciplinary case records on an individual basis. In the last five years there were over 1,270 such cases. Our HR team estimate that to conduct such an exercise it would take 8 minutes per case, meaning that to review all such cases over the period in question would take around 170 hours.
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. However, please note that given the figures cited above, even reducing the timeframe by a large extent – such as to the last year – this would still invoke the costs exemption (there were 209 disciplinary cases raised in the last 12 months, which would take around 28 hours to review).
Further question: Can you break down the 1270 disciplinary cases by business unit? Eg Finance, HR, Occupational Health
Additionally, can you break down these 1270 disciplinary cases by reasons?
Thanks
We answered
TfL Ref: FOI-2592-2425
Thank you for your further request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 14th November 2024.
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy.
In relation to our answer to Question 2 of you previous request, you asked:
“You have not answered the question asked. Can you confirm if employee assault of another employee is a serious breach of TFL policies and procedures? A simple yes or no would suffice.”
The answer is that yes, on the face of it, it would be. However, to fully ascertain whether a breach has occurred and to what extent, a full, fair and thorough investigation would need to be conducted into the matter, to establish all the facts.
In relation to our answer to Questions 14-16 of your original request, you asked:
“Can you break down the 1270 disciplinary cases by business unit? Eg Finance, HR, Occupational Health. Additionally, can you break down these 1270 disciplinary cases by reasons?”.
In regard to the request for a breakdown by business unit, please see the table below:
Chief Area
Disciplinary Cases
C&S Office
56
Chief Capital Officer
26
Chief Financial Officer
5
Chief Operating Officer
1170
Chief People Officer
8
General Counsel
2
SHE
3
In regard to the request for a breakdown by reason, please see the table below. However, please note the following:
there were 702 cases where we can extract a reason for the case from a reportable field in the recording system (reason fields are available for cases raised after May 2021 only. Prior to that, the reasons would need to be sourced by individually looking at each case file. To do this for the remaining 568 cases would take longer than the 18 hour costs limit previously cited).
Disciplinary cases can have up to 6 reasons allocated to them. This is why there are 816 reasons below, which relate to the 702 distinct cases that have at least one reason recorded against them.
Case Reason
Number of instances
Abuse
16
Attendance at work
83
Bullying and harassment
37
Business ethics
43
Code of conduct
352
Drugs and alcohol
69
Failure to account
21
Fraud
20
Health and safety
69
Imprisonment/conviction
5
Misuse of benefits/resources
5
Other reason
49
Performance management
42
Social Media
5
Grand Total
816
If this is not the information you are looking for 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.
