Our Ref:         FOI-3797-1920

Thank you for your request received on 10 March 2020 asking for information about CIRAS (Confidential Incident Reporting and Analysis System) and the Croydon Tram.

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 we do hold the information you require.

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 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 called Discovery Accelerator. This 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.

We have done an initial search for all emails held by TfL sent/received by Jill Collis, who was the Health, Safety, & Environment Director for the majority of the requested time period, that includes the words ‘CIRAS’ and ‘tram’. This has returned almost 600 hits. A further search of all emails that contain the words “Confidential Incident Reporting and Analysis System” and “tram” produced 111 hits. These results will likely includes duplicates, as well as emails sent from third parties that we were copied into so are not caught by the request. However, we would still need to manually review all of the emails identified by the search in order to extract and collate the relevant emails.

In addition to the emails we have already identified we would also need to expand the search to other employees once we had included our initial review, as well as likely increase the scope of the keywords. We would also need to identify, locate, and extract the other documentation you have requested.

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. For example, if there are more specific keywords or TfL personnel that you would like to limit your search to.

There has also been a Mayor’s Question (MQ) asking for similar information, albeit for a shortened timeframe: https://www.london.gov.uk/questions/2020/1103. The response to this MQ may help you to refine your request or identify areas you would like further information on.

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 us.

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

[email protected]