Please provide me with digital copies of the London Underground Daily Operational Performance Reports from the 27/03/2019 and going as far back as possible, preferably to when detailed daily reporting began. Please note I am specifically requesting the detailed daily reports that lists the timeline of all incidents throughout the given day and not generalised performance figures. Could I also please kindly request that the files supplied are separated into separate PDFs for their respective days rather than one mass PDF file containing all of the information

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Our ref: FOI-3588-1819/GH

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 28 March 2019 asking for copies of the London Underground Daily Operational Performance Reports.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy.

I can confirm we do hold the information you require, however, we are refusing your request under section 14(1) of the Act, as we consider that providing the requested information would place an unreasonable burden on us. Our principal duty is to provide an effective transport service for London and we consider that answering this request would represent a disproportionate effort. It would be a significant distraction from our work managing the TfL network, requiring re-allocation of already limited resources and placing an unacceptable burden on a small number of personnel. We do wish to clarify that whilst we consider that your request falls under section 14(1) of the FOI Act, this does not reflect a conclusion that it has been your intention to deliberately place an undue burden on our resources.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) guidance states that one of the indicators of a request which may fall under section 14(1) is that it “appears to be part of a completely random approach, lacks any clear focus, or seems to have been solely designed for the purpose of ‘fishing’ for information without any idea of what might be revealed.”

The ICO guidance provides the following examples of a ‘fishing expedition’ request which may fall under section 14(1) if it:

- Imposes a burden by obliging the authority to sift through a substantial volume of information to isolate and extract the relevant details;

- Encompasses information which is only of limited value because of the wide scope of the request;

- Creates a burden by requiring the authority to spend a considerable amount of time considering any exemptions and redactions.

Our view is that all three of these examples apply in this instance. We hold copies of the daily reports from the beginning of January 2016. Extracting and collating over 1000 of these reports would be a significant task, and every report would need to be manually read to ensure that it did not contain any personal or sensitive information. As you have not specified any particluar time frame, we feel this wide ranging and non-specific request will very likely encompass information which is only of limited value. In that respect, it is noteworthy that your request is not for information on any specific subject or issue – instead you have simply asked for copies of the reports going as far back as possible. Providing each daily report as a separate PDF file would only add to the task.

If you would like to re-submit a more focused, specific request then we will, of course, consider it. For example, a request for the daily reports for a much smaller and specific time period is less likely to raise concerns about the disproportionate effort required to answer it. Requests that lack a clear focus are more likely to lead to concerns about the processing time required to meet our obligations under the FOI Act.

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

Yours sincerely

Graham Hurt

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

Information Governance

Room 291, 2^nd Floor Petty France,

55 Broadway,

London SW1H 0BD

[email protected]

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