We would like to request the number of people taken into labour and/or who gave birth on the London Underground in the years 16/17/18/19. It's for a podcast series focussing on the tube.

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TfL Ref: FOI-3361-1819

Thank you for your email received by Transport for London (TfL) on 11 March 2019, asking about the number of people that were taken into labour or gave birth on the London Underground.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our 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.

Unfortunately we do not record incidents, that occur across the London Underground, under this specific category. These are not considered to be safety incident and are unlikely to impact on the reliability of the network.  We have conducted a text search of reported incidents with likely terms (birth, born, baby, labour, etc…”, but have not found any relevant incidents.  To proceed further would require manual review of 4,681 incidents, and we have estimated that it would considerably exceed the cost limit to provide a response to your request.

Whilst local records may be kept at individual stations, the process to manually locate and extract them, would also 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. 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 Transport for London. 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. You might also consider limiting your request to a shorter period of time, geographical area or specific departments of TfL.

Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, TfL does 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.

While we cannot verify the accuracy or source of the data, I would refer you to a book by Geoff Marshall ‘Tube Station Trivia’, published in 2018, in which he says there have been five births on the London Underground since 1924. Please note this is entirely anecdotal.

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.

Yours sincerely

Eva Hextall

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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