Our Ref:        FOI-2806-2425

Thank you for your request received on 4 December 2024 asking for correspondence related to the Suffragettes.

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 that we do hold the information you have requested. 

Unfortunately, to provide the information you have requested would still exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the FOI (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.

As previously advised, we identified over 700 emails and/or email chains that contain the words “Suffragette” or “Suffragettes”. As detailed in the response to your internal review, at a conservative estimate this would take approximately 25 working hours to complete. The response went on further to explain that we expect the actual processing time would exceed this due to the need to broaden the searches. As your new request has also asked for emails that contain the words "Women's Social and Political Union" or "WSPU" it would certainly take us over the appropriate limit to provide the requested information. In addition, due to the recent cyber attack we are not currently able to conduct company-wide email searches so any search would have to be done on individual email accounts which means a considerable more amount of time would be needed to identify any relevant emails before the manual process of having to review all of them. 

Given our recent responses, and the current restraints on our ability to search for emails, it is likely that any future requests will encounter the similar issues in processing your request and would likely lead to concerns about the processing time required to meet our obligations under the FOI Act.

If you do chose to refine your request or make a FOI Act request in future, once again please bear in mind that the FOI 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. If there are specific questions you have then we may be able to provide a response to those.

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]