Prosecutions/Fines under TFL Railway Byelaws

The request was refused by Transport for London.

Dear Transport for London,

As you are no doubt aware, certain behaviours are regulated on your services by the creation of byelaws. The most recent set of railway byelaws (which cover The Tube, The Overground, and the DLR) can be found here:

https://www.tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/do...

The byelaws list a series of rules people must follow, and a section on enforcement stating that the fine for breaching a byelaw (or in some cases, attempting to breach one) is "a penalty not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale" - currently £1000.

I would like to know the following:

1. Broken down by each byelaw, how many penalties have been issued over each of the last 3 complete years for which data exists or can be found? In other words, how many people have been fined for breaking byelaw 1 (Queuing), how may for breaking byelaw 2 (Potentially dangerous items), and so on. I do not require this to be broken down further into subsections of byelaws - with two exceptions.
1a. From the data above, how many penalties come from each of byelaw 1(1) and byelaw 9(1)?
2. How many of the penalties were for the full £1000 amount. Please break this down into each byelaw (but not subsection) if possible.

Yours faithfully,

Pip Moss

FOI, Transport for London

Dear Pip

TfL Ref: 1893-1415

Thank you for your email received by Transport for London (TfL) on 16 February 2015. I apologise for not getting back to you sooner.

Your request will be processed in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and TfL’s information access policy.

A response will be provided to you by 16 March 2015. We publish a substantial range of information on our website on subjects including operational performance, contracts, expenditure, journey data, governance and our financial performance. This includes data which is frequently asked for in FOI requests or other public queries. Please check http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transpar... to see if this helps you.

In the meantime, if you would like to discuss this matter further, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours sincerely

Jasmine Howard
FOI Case Officer
FOI Case Management Team
General Counsel
Transport for London

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FOI, Transport for London

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Dear Mr Moss

 

TfL Ref: 1893-1415

 

Thank you for your email received by us on 16 February 2015 asking for
information about the number of penalties issued for breaking various
byelaws for each of the last three years.

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 £1,575 to provide a response to your
current request. This is because it is estimated that it would take a
conservative estimate of 81 working hours to retrieve and compile the
information you have requested.

 

Our prosecutions data and results is recorded on paperwork which is taken
to Court and transferred onto a computer database. The hard copy files are
then archived off-site. The data held on our software is accessed by a
series of reports; none of which can currently extract the results and
success rates of prosecution matters by the system’s 'charge'
classification. Therefore the options available are to either retrieve
five years of court paperwork from our external archives, manually extract
the data and review upwards of 25,000 files. Alternatively, a reporting
system would need to be designed by a software developer to extract the
data accordingly that would also be a time consuming and lengthy process
given the considerable volume of paperwork involved.

 

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 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. You might also
consider limiting your request to a particular period of time,
geographical area or specific departments of the organisation.

 

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 as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would
like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.

 

Yours sincerely

 

 

Jasmine Howard

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

 

 

 

 

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