Our Ref:         FOI-3965-1920

Thank you for your request received on 30 March 2020 asking for correspondence regarding the running of London’s transport network following the Covid-19 outbreak.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. I can confirm that 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 in excess of £450 to provide a response to your current request. This is because it is estimated that it would take over 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 to/received from the public authorities listed in your request using the keyword ‘virus’, this has returned over 4,500 hits. A large number of these would most likely be irrelevant to your request (for instance, because they include standard wording about computer viruses), and there would be some duplication. However, we would need to manually review all of the emails identified by the search in order to extract and collate the relevant emails.

It is also an unavoidable consequence that processing this request would require critical employees to be diverted from their operational responsibilities and, in the current circumstances, we consider that our priority must remain on providing and maintaining an effective transport system to essential workers across the capital and that our limited resources are utilised as effectively as possible to ensure that happens. By their nature, emails contain a significant amount of personal data such as phone numbers and email addresses. Whilst the process of redaction does not feature as part of our considerations on whether the cost limit might apply, the burden created by non-specific requests for emails is significant and this should be borne in mind before submitting requests of this nature.

As you are aware, the Government has announced a series of measures to tackle the coronavirus. It is essential for London, and in particular for all critical workers, that we continue to provide a safe transport network that enables them to make the journeys they need to.

In current circumstances, we are not able to answer FOI requests readily and we ask that you please do not make a request to us at present. Should you wish to submit a revised request please note that our response time will be affected by the current situation and so you may wish to reconsider the timing of this 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]