Request ID: FOI-2752-2324 Date published: 24 November 2023
You asked
Dear Sir / Madam, could you please advise me how many and what proportion of your office-based employees currently work from home. By "currently work from home", I mean the average proportion and number who worked from home during the months of September and October this year.
I would also like the same figures for the same two-month period in 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019.
Could you also please advise how many desk spaces TFL currently operates and their average occupancy level during the period of October and September and provide the same figures for 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019.
If there is a problem with providing specific answers to any of these requests please provide to the best of your ability any information that will help shed a light on how the practice of working from home has changed at TFL over the past five years.
Many thanks.
We answered
TfL Refs: FOI-2752-2324, FOI-2801-2324 and FOI-2896-2324 Thank you for your requests received by Transport for London (TfL) on 1st, 2nd and 13th November 2023. Your requests have been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. Specifically you asked for the following: Case reference FOI-2752-2324: “Could you please advise me how many and what proportion of your office-based employees currently work from home. By "currently work from home", I mean the average proportion and number who worked from home during the months of September and October this year. I would also like the same figures for the same two-month period in 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019. Could you also please advise how many desk spaces TFL currently operates and their average occupancy level during the period of October and September and provide the same figures for 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019.” Case reference FOI-2801-2324: “Follow-up to TfL Ref: 2419-2324. In light of this response, I will reduce the number of years I am asking for from two to one. Could you please provide the requested information for only 2022. On the basis of your explanation, that should lower the cost of completing this request by another 50 per cent, making it a fifth of the cost of the original request.” Case reference FOI-2896-2324: “How many deaths on London's roads in 2022 were caused by or estimated to be caused by motor vehicles travelling below 30mph?” I can confirm that we hold the information you require. However, I am afraid that to source all of the information requested would exceed 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 obliged to provide information if it would cost more than £450 to determine if that 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. Note that for the purposes of considering costs, any requests received from the same applicant within a 60 consecutive days can be aggregated. In this case the exemption applies because the information has not been collated before and there is no quick or efficient way of doing so. For example, in relation to case reference FOI-2752-2324, no central record is kept of whether staff are working in the office or at home. Since the end of the pandemic there has been an expectation that all office-based staff will work at least 50% of their time in the office. However, the actual information requested will only be held – if at all – at the local level, with individual managers responsible for agreeing / monitoring their staff’s working pattern. To gather this information for all such staff would in itself exceed the costs limit. Similarly, as previously advised, for case reference FOI-2801-2324 the information is not held in the format requested. Rather, we would have to identify all projects to install cycle lanes – including those on borough-managed roads – and then cross-reference those designs with information that is held on the locations of bus lanes, to see where sections of bus lane may have been removed. Again, this task alone – even for one year – would likely to trigger the costs exemption by itself and simply isn’t information that is recorded in any reportable format so would require creating. Answering case reference FOI-2896-2324 increases the costs burden further (note that on the subject or road safety you may be interested in the data TfL proactively publishes on our website – including our Collisions Map – which can be found on our website here:https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/publications-and-reports/road-safety). You may wish to consider narrowing / reframing your requests to bring them under the costs limit, focussing on the information that is of most importance to you. 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
