Our Ref:         FOI-3150-1819

Thank you for your request received on 19 February 2019 asking for correspondence regarding the ‘Tappa’ app.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and TfL’s information access policy.

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 cost over £450 to provide a response to your current request. This is because it is estimated that it would take over 18 working hours to retrieve and compile the information you have requested.

When requests for email correspondence are received the FOI Case Management team may use a search tool called Discovery Accelerator. This allows us to conduct company wide email searches using keywords, dates and email addresses. However, this can only be done once the emails have been archived which occurs 15 days after the date of receipt. Before archiving occurs, in order to process your request we would need to ask everyone with a TfL email account to search whether they have had any correspondence with PC Alistair Strange as we do not have a way of conducting a remote search for emails during the time period you requested. Clearly, arranging for over 20,000 TfL employees to search their mailboxes would exceed the cost limit.

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 received a number of speculative ‘pan-TfL’ email requests recently and would urge you to focus your requests as clearly and concisely as you can to ensure the best possible use of the processing time under the FOI Act. You might also consider limiting your request to specific departments of TfL or individuals within TfL whom you think may hold the information you require.

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

Yours sincerely

Gemma Jacob
Senior FOI Case Officer
FOI Case Management Team
General Counsel
Transport for London

[email protected]