TfL Ref: FOI-3086-2324
Thank you for your request which we received on 27 November 2023, asking for information about ill health pension.
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. I can confirm that we hold the information you require. You asked:
How many TfL employees who were granted an ill health pension in the last 10 years, have had a review?
Of those how many had their ill health pension reduced or terminated?
Unfortunately, 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. This is calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described.
We do not hold this in a reportable form. Normally, cases are only reviewed on contact being made by a member. In order to answer your request, we would have to manually review 10 years’ worth of ill health retirement records to try to locate how many had been reviewed, and then had their pension reduced or terminated. This would take an excessive amount of staff time and resources to retrieve and compile.
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 limit your request to a particular document or a narrowed period of time.
You also asked:
If a member is in receipt of an ill-health pension, the Fund requires the member to tell us if the total of their current earnings when added to their pension exceeds the greater of the reference earnings figure (currently £33,700 - this is increased annually by earnings inflation) and 150% of their current pension. What figure are you taking into account and could you draw an example with figures of what it actually means?
If your earnings are equal to more than 50% of your pension, then if the total of your earnings and pension exceed the monetary limit (the £33,700 referred to above) then you have to contact the Trustees.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Eva Hextall
FOI Case Management Team
General Counsel
Transport for London
