Railway and Bus Prosecutions for Ticketing Offences
Request ID: FOI-2921-2122 Date published: 13 April 2022
You asked
Please provide me with the number of prosecutions made by TfL since 2015 for ticketing offences on TfL's bus and rail network. Please, if possible, may your response break it down by year, offence type (including section/regulation of the relevant act, byelaw or statutory instrument) and the outcome of the prosecution. For example: 2017 | Section 5(3), Regulation of Railways Act 1889 | Found Not Guilty.
Please also provide me with the number of prosecutions that were take over by the Crown Prosecution Service.
We answered
Our ref: FOI-2921-2122/GH
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 21 March 2022 asking for information about Railway and Bus Prosecutions for Ticketing Offences.
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. Whilst we can provide you with the numbers or prosecutions, to provide the detailed information you have requested would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004. This is because there are dozens of ticketing offences across Public Service Vehicle regulations, Railway Act and TfL Rail Byelaws and there are thousands of cases which would need to be assessed to answer your request.
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’.
Please let us know if you would like the less detailed overall numbers of prosecutions and outcomes excluding offence type.
CPS have been invited to take over and discontinue some of our cases, but after review, the majority of these were returned to TfL to continue with the prosecution. One case was taken over by the CPS.
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
