Can you please send me copies of any correspondence between Transport for London and the Garden Bridge Trust in connection with the January 2016 decision by the Garden Bridge Trust to sign a construction contract with Bouygues, from 1 January 2015 to 1 January 2017.

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TfL Ref: FOI-2973-1718

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 17 January 2018 asking for correspondence.

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 the information you require.

Unfortunately, to provide the information you have requested in 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. This is calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described. In order to identify the information covered by your request we ran a remote search for emails within the specified time period that contain the keywords “Bouygues” and/or “construction contract” held by employees engaged in the Garden Bridge project. This search produced 596 emails.

Whilst we can not be certain that this search incorporates every email that refers to the decision by the Garden Bridge Trust to sign a construction contract with Bouygues, it is also apparent that the search results has produced a significant number of emails that do not fit within the scope of your request. The only way to extract those that are relevant is to manually review each email individually and then collate those that are relevant accordingly. Once that process had been completed it is then likely that we would need to consider further, more specific searches for anything that we consider might be missing from the results.

We have therefore estimated that it would exceed the cost limit to provide a response to your request. 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. We have attached an email and letter relevant to your request that has been disclosed in response to a previous Freedom of Information request which you may find useful in identifying ways of refining your request sufficiently. As an example, you may wish to provide a more narrow timeframe and/or suggest specific keywords to search on that are less likely to generate such a large volume of results.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Lee Hill

Senior FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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