In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act, please could you provide a year-by-year breakdown detailing the number of non-disclosure agreements present in TfL contracts since 2008 up until the end of 2018. Please specify how many of these were agreed internally between TfL and TfL staff and how many were signed with third parties.

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TfL Ref: 2978-1819

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 6 February 2019 asking for a year-by-year breakdown detailing the number of non-disclosure agreements present in TfL contracts since 2008 up until the end of 2018.  

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy.  I can confirm we do hold the information you require.

Unfortunately, to provide the information you have requested 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.

We have estimated that it would significantly exceed the cost limit to provide a response to your current request. This is because we don’t currently capture this information centrally, and for our commercial business area alone, we would have to review a large number of contracts with suppliers one by one to ascertain which ones have non disclosure agreements in them.   We estimate that this would take considerably longer than the 18 hours permitted under the Regulations, if we allow five minutes to review each record. This does not include the time it would take to gather the same information from our HR records which is also in scope of your request.

However, we publish copies of our higher value contracts (above the OJEU limit) and so information on whether these include a non-disclosure agreement is available for you to review. See https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transparency/#on-this-page-4

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. If you want to refine your request or make a Freedom of Information Act request in future, please bear in mind that the Freedom of Information Act allows you to request recorded information held by us. You should identify the information that you want as clearly and concisely as you can, specifying the types of document that you are looking for. For example, if you are interested in a specific non-disclosure agreement then we can consider any questions you may have on that.

Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, we do not have to answer your question if it would require the creation of new information or the provision of a judgement, explanation, advice or opinion that was not already recorded at the time of your request.

Please note that we will not be taking further action until we receive your revised request.

In the meantime, if you have any queries or would like to discuss your request, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.

Yours sincerely

Sara Thomas

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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