TfL Ref 2602-2021 Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 21 March 2021 asking for information about roadworks that have taken place in the borough of Westminster between 1st January 2016 - present. Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. I can confirm we do hold some of the information you require. You asked for: the archive of information that has appeared on London's Register of Roadworks (http://public.londonworks.gov.uk/roadwor...) concerning roadworks that have taken place in the borough of Westminster between 1st January 2016 - present. This should include work type, Reference, Location, Status, Description, Dates and any other captured information. However, we are refusing your request under section 14(1) of the Act. After reviewing a sample of our records we consider that providing the requested information would place an unreasonable burden on TfL. Our principal duty is to provide an effective transport service for London and we consider that answering this request would represent a disproportionate effort. It would be a significant distraction from our work managing the TfL network, requiring re-allocation of already limited resources and placing an unacceptable burden on a small number of personnel. We do wish to clarify that whilst we consider that your request falls under section 14(1) of the FOI Act, this does not reflect a conclusion that it has been your intention to deliberately place an undue burden on our resources. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) guidance provides the following examples of a request which may fall under section 14(1): - Imposes a burden by obliging the authority to sift through a substantial volume of information to isolate and extract the relevant details; - Encompasses information which is only of limited value because of the wide scope of the request; - Creates a burden by requiring the authority to spend a considerable amount of time considering any exemptions and redactions. Our view is that all three of these examples apply in this instance. The Public Register only stores data for work happening up to 3 months in the future and for 2 weeks in the past. The Public Register takes a feed from another database called LondonWorks which is where historical data on roadworks is kept for around 12 years. However, in order to gather the data you have requested, we have extracted a report from this database which has generated roughly 2,320,675 records, totalling more than 600MB in size. Aside from the difficulties which we would face in sending out a report of that size, which would require splitting the data into a number of files which would increase the burden of work, the burden of reviewing the enormous amount of data in this report on a line by line basis and then redacting any personal information from the report, in particular in the ‘works description’ field, would be disproportionate to the benefit of providing it and would take a large amount of time to carry out. It is also worth noting that we would also not be able to say with any certainty that the information held on the LondonWorks database is the same information that had appeared on the Public Register. Therefore we are refusing your request under s.14 of the FOI Act. Whilst we recognise the requested information will be of interest to some people, we do not consider that the wider public interest is served by the diversion of resources that would be necessary to answer this request. If you would like to re-submit a more focused, specific request then we will, of course, consider it. Our understanding is that Westminster Council, who have a legal responsibility to keep a register of all works undertaken within their Borough may hold some of the information you are interested in and it may be worth contacting them directly to see if they can assist you: https://www.westminster.gov.uk/data-protection/freedom-information. If you are considering submitting a further FOI request please think carefully about whether the request is essential at this current time, as answering FOI requests will require the use of limited resources and the attention of staff who could be supporting other essential activity. Where requests are made, please note that our response time may be impacted by the current situation. We apologise that we are unable to assist you on this occasion. Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal. Yours sincerely Sara Thomas FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London