Request ID: FOI-4054-2324 Date published: 04 March 2024
You asked
Please advise the top 3 maintenance material suppliers for each London Underground fleet plus an indication of the types of material they supply, annual contract value and when the contracts are due to expire.
We answered
Our ref: FOI-4054-2324/GH Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 7 February 2024, asking for information about the maintenance of the London Underground fleets. 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 hold some of the information you require. You specifically asked:
Please advise the top 3 maintenance material suppliers for each London Underground fleet plus an indication of the types of material they supply, annual contract value and when the contracts are due to expire.
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.
The information you asked for is not readily available and there is no single system from which to extract the information in the required format. Rather, your request would have to be put to multiple areas across TfL, using different systems, in order to source the information you require for all the different London Underground fleets we operate. This includes eight London Underground tube stocks with 10 different fleets but would not include the Elizabeth Line and the Northern line which are not maintained by London Underground. The systems we use do not record the data in the format you have requested, and we would have to run multiple reports and spend excessive amount of staff time and resources on cross referencing them in order to answer your specific request.
We can however provide some information more easily, for example the top 3 materials suppliers (goods and services) for London Underground – as a whole, annual spend (FY 23/24 1 April to today) and we could also give a steer on the commodities they supply but this would not be by London Underground Fleet. We would not be able to provide the contract expiry dates as the data is not listed with contract expiry dates. We could also supply the top 3 fleet contracted suppliers (goods and services) to London Underground – as a whole, total cumulative contract value and any known expiry dates and an indication of the commodities they supply, but this would not be by London Underground Fleet.
To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, please consider narrowing its scope so that we can more easily locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking. I would recommend you try to rephrase your request in line with what we hold and are able to extract from our systems, as I explained above, so that we can provide a more helpful response.
Please note that we will not be taking further action until we receive your revised request.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely Graham Hurt FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
