Request ID: FOI-3707-2324 Date published: 07 February 2024
You asked
Your spokesperson said: “We can confirm that, following a thorough internal investigation in accordance with our agreed formal processes, disciplinary action has been taken with regard to the driver who made announcements on the Central line on October 21 last year”
Please can you provide:
1) The file names and file extensions of any electronic documents generated during the pre-investigation period, the investigation, and disciplinary process for this incident. This may include completed templates, incident logs, investigation-specific documentation, meeting minutes, memos, or similar.
2) electronic communications (primarily emails, but also Instant Messages if providing these would not cause the Section 12 time limit to be surpassed across all 3 questions) between management in TfL regarding the incident - from 21st October 2023 up to and including the 24th October 2023. Limit this to senior management and those specifically involved & responsible for the investigation & disciplinary action.
3) the full incident report and completed disciplinary documentation relating to the incident. If it is not possible to redact and provide the full report due to time limitations, and a management or executive summary instead exists, please provide those instead in answer to this question.
We answered
Our Ref: FOI-3707-2324
Thank you for your request received on 18 January 2024 asking for information about at incident on the Central line on 21 October 2023.
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy. I can confirm that we do hold the information you require. Following a thorough internal investigation in accordance with our agreed formal processes, disciplinary action has been taken with regard to the driver who made announcements on the Central line on 21 October last year. The driver has also written to faith groups that we have been engaging with since October to apologise for the announcements and for the impact they had on some customers travelling on the train and in the wider community. It is critically important to everyone at TfL that our network feels, and is, a safe and welcoming place for all Londoners, and we will do all we can to continue to ensure that.
In accordance with the FOI Act, we are not obliged to provide you with the incident report or any related disciplinary documentation as it is exempt from disclosure under section 40(2) of the FOI Act, and in accordance with TfL’s obligations under Data Protection legislation. This is because disclosure of this personal data would be a breach of the legislation, specifically the first principle which requires all processing of personal data to be fair and lawful. It would not be fair to disclose this personal information when the individuals have no expectation it would be disclosed and TfL has not satisfied one of the conditions which would make the processing ‘fair’.
This exemption to the right of access to information is an absolute exemption and not subject to an assessment of whether the public interest favours use of the exemption.
Unfortunately, to provide the remaining information you have requested would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the FOI (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 the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 to provide a response to your current requests, we are therefore applying an aggregate cost limit under section 12 of the FOI Act. This is because it is estimated that it would take in excess of 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 which allows us to conduct company-wide email searches using keywords, dates and email addresses. The more specific a requester can be as to what they are looking for, the more we can narrow the search and therefore stand a better chance of a more relevant or focused result. A search will then return an amount of ‘hits’ which potentially contain information relating to the search terms used. Each ‘hit’ is a single email, although that email will often consist of a chain of emails containing the search term at least once. It is likely that several teams will have received and sent several emails regarding this incident, including but not limited to Customer Services, the Press Office, and the station team. Therefore in order to begin to identify the information you have requested we would need to do a company-wide search, for terms such as ‘announcement’ or ‘Palestine’. We would need to manually review all of the emails identified by the search in order to extract and collate the relevant emails. However, it is unlikely to capture all of the relevant information as other terms may have been used. In addition to any emails we would also have to identify and locate any other documentation that may relate to the incident. As with the emails, this would require several teams to do a search for any information relevant to your request which would add to the time taken to process your request. 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 FOI Act request in future, please bear in mind that the FOI Act allows you to request recorded information held by us. 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. If there are specific questions you have then we may be able to provide a response to those, however please note that as this FOI concerns a matter relating to an identifiable individual who was subject to an investigation and disciplinary action some information may well be withheld as this is personal data.
Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, we do 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. 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
Gemma Jacob Senior FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
