Request ID: FOI-3155-2223 Date published: 16 March 2023
You asked
The TSSA union sent an email to TFL on the 11th May 2017 outlining their considerable concerns regarding the Transformation process. Could this email be provided?
Additionally, at the TFL BAU Company Council on 11.05.2017, Martin Boots, Head of Employee Relations stated that he would respond in writing to this TSSA email.
Can you also provide a copy of this written response?
Thank you for your requests which we received on 17 & 25 February 2023, asking for information about the LU Company Council and Occupational Health meeting notes and documents and emails with TSSA relating to the Transformation process.
Your requests have been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy.
However, 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 of £450 provided for in the Freedom of Information (FOI) and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004. This is calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described.
Under Regulation 5(2) of the Data Protection and Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004, we are permitted to aggregate requests where they relate to any extent to the same or similar information and this aggregation applies to any requests that are received within a sixty working day period, including individuals considered to be acting in concert.
We consider that the aggregate cost of complying with your FOI requests referred to above would considerably exceed the cost limit. We estimate that to even identify if the information exists and is still held would be very time consuming. The information you are asking for is not stored centrally, much of it is included in emails or folders held by various people across the organisation, some of whom had left TfL. The only way to obtain emails, would be to conduct a remote search and then manually review each item in order to extract any which fall within the scope of your request. In addition, we would need to carry out further searches for documents and meeting minutes, using key words, to ensure that we had captured everything, which would increase the number of items that we would need to review. The age of the information you require is also a significant factor in how difficult it’ll be to obtain it, given it still exists.
However, whilst searching for emails and meeting minutes in response to your requests, we did find some TfL BAU Company Counsel meeting notes and management scripts relating to TfL’s Transformation Programme from May, August, September and December 2017, which you might be interested in. If you do submit a revised request, please consider which information is of the highest priority to make best use of the processing time within the Act described above. It’s better to submit single, complete request for information than splitting the information you require amongst different requests as this will not circumvent the cost limit.
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 feel free to contact me.
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
