Our ref: FOI-2675-1617

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 29 March 2017 asking for information about the Equality Act 2010.

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.

At Transport for London, we take the health of employees, both mentally and physically, very seriously. We have an Occupational Health team, which offers a range of resources so that our employees are able to keep well and seek advice when they need it. We also have a disability staff network group, which enables our employees who are affected by disability to meet and support each other.

1. I request to know how a public sector like TfL deals with employees covered by the Equality Act 2010 (disabled employees).
   
   

   Please see the attached attendance at work and equality and inclusion policies.

   
   
   

    

   
   
   
2. How many employees covered by the Equality Act 2010 does TfL currently have?
   
   

   All employees are covered by the Equality Act. At the end of the financial year 2016/17 TfL had 25,078 permanent or fixed term contract employees.

   
   
   

    

   
   
   
3. Please provide names of employees who were on disability related sick leave for over a year and what did TfL do to support them?
   
   

   We cannot provide you with this personal information as it is subject to a statutory exemption to the right of access to information under section 40(2) of the FOI Act and in accordance with TfL’s obligations under the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA). This is because disclosure of this personal information would be a breach of the DPA, specifically the first principle of the DPA which requires all processing of personal data to be fair and lawful. It would not be fair to disclose this personal information when the individuals have no expectation it would be disclosed and TfL has not satisfied one of the conditions of Schedule 2 of the Data Protection Act which would make the processing ‘fair’.

   
   
   

    

   
   
   
4. Since the Equality Act came into effect in 2010, how many disabled employees has TfL dismissed due to disability related absences?

To provide this information 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. In this instance, we estimate that the time required to do this would exceed 18 hours which, at £25 per hour (the rate stipulated by the Regulations), exceeds the ‘appropriate limit’.

We do not record specifically a dismissal due to disability related absences. Any such occurrences would be recorded under one of three actions: Medical Termination Appeal cases, Medical Redeployment cases, and Long Term Absence cases.

To answer this question, we would need to manually check each one of these cases since 2010 to see whether the condition was disability related, which would take in excess of the appropriate limit of 18 hours.

To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider narrowing its scope so that we can more easily locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking. For example you may wish to reduce the amount of information requested by refining your request to concentrate on matters which are important to you.

If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for some reason, please do not hesitate to contact me.

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