I would be grateful if you could provide me with a list of land and property sold by the department, or contracts to sell property entered into, worth over 1m pounds over the last ten years. I would be grateful for the address of the property, including the postcode, together with the price paid, the buyer and the agents employed by your department to advise on the transaction. I would be also grateful if you could details any additional payments made in relation to the sale, for example overage payments. Finally, if it would be possible to indicate whether the property was sold subject to planning, or with planning permission in place I would be grateful. If it is convenient to present this information in the form of a spreadsheet that would be optimal. I realise this may be a complex request, section 16 of the FOI Act places a duty on public authorities to provide assistance to requesters to provide assistance to requesters. If you think there will be difficulty in fulfilling this request, I would ask that you reply to that effect at the earliest opportunity, rather than waiting the full 20 working days.

---

Dear

Our ref: FOI-4860-1718

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 13 March 2018 asking for information about TfL property.

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

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 at least £2,375 to provide a response to your current request. This is because it is estimated that it would take approximately 95 working hours to retrieve and compile the information you have requested.

In order to collate some of the information you have requested, particularly the names of the buyers and agents and whether the property was sold with a planning permission, would be very time consuming. This is because there is no central record of these files and to find this detail would require going to each surveyor who dealt with each sale to manually review their records going back 10 years and find the relevant details.

Some information is readily available and could be provided within the appropriate cost limit, such as the property address, description, sale date and price. However, we are issuing a refusal notice to your request as a whole and you may wish to revise your requests and prioritise which information you require within the 18 hour limit.

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 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 Transport for London. 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.

Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, TfL does 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

Eva Hextall

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

Back to top

---