Freedom of Information Act and the Jubilee Line

Those who live in London and commute every day will know what I mean. We’ve been suffering from closures of tube (metro) lines nearly every weekend for over a year now, with TfL promising improved service, more space yaddayaddayadda…

Well, nothing seems to be helping the Jubilee line commuters (and those of a dozen other lines I’m sure, but I can only speak of my misery), who find themselves stranded every time the line is suspended because of the same f…ing signal failing all the time!

And here is where the Freedom of Information Act comes in: it allows anyone to request information from any public service (such as TfL) about anything that they might hold information on - and the best part is that they have to respond within 20 days. Well it’s time they did some homework, this is my request made today - I’ll keep you updated on any progress made:

Dear Sir or Madam,

for the past year we have been putting up with weekend closures of
the Jubilee line, with the promise of improvement to service.

On the morning of Friday the 20th of March, during rush hour, part
of the Jubilee line was suspended due to a signal failure at Canary
Wharf.

The weekend of 21-22 March part of the line was closed for
“improvement works”.

On Monday the 23rd of March, again during the morning rush hour,
the Jubilee line had severe delays due to a signal failure, again,
at Canary Wharf.

During both incidents there seemed to be a distinct lack of
communication and coordination between members of staff at the
stations and between controllers of the Jubilee Line and London
Buses controllers, resulting in hundreds of passengers being left
stranded at bus stops and tube stations in both directions, with no
means to continue their journeys, while buses were going back and
forth randomly altering their routes and just “dumping” passengers
en route with no explanation.

As your so called improvement works continue into this year, I
would like to request the following information, all in electronic
format please:

1) A spreadsheet with all planned track closures for the Jubilee
line for the past 365 days, detailing the following information:

i) Dates of closure.

ii) For each date, a summary of the work planned to be carried out
during the closure and (if not obvious) the reason(s) why this
would warrant suspension of service.

iii) For each date, a summary of the ACTUAL work completed on that
date.

iv) For each date, the above (point iii) expressed as an
approximate percentage of the worked planned for that date (as per
point ii) (i.e. percentage of work actually completed compared to
work planned).

2) A spreadsheet of unplanned suspensions of service on the Jubilee
line (complete or partial) or incidents involving severe delays,
for the past 365 days, detailing the following information:

i) Dates.

ii) Duration of each incident.

iii) Reason for incident.

iv) Person or company responsible for the incident occurring (e.g.
they could be responsible due to improper maintenance or operation
of a signal).

v) What actions were taken so that the incident would not re-occur.

vi) Number of passengers estimated to have been affected by each
incident.

vii) Number of passengers who applied for a ticket refund based on
your Customer Charter for each incident.

3) Additionally on point 2 above, for incidents that occurred
repeatedly (i.e. more than once in 5 days) please specify why these
occurred repeatedly (as the problem should have been fixed in a
reliable way in the first instance), who was responsible for this
(person or company) and what action was taken to ensure that they
would not occur again.

3) Any documents you hold with regards to how the improvement works
on the Jubilee line have actually affected (in a positive or
negative way) the reliability of the service provided. Please note
that I am not interested in the standard marketing documents that
you produce as big posters at stations or on your website, but
rather any unpublished documents based on actual and measured data
and not marketing promises.

4) Any documents outlining policies or memos to your members of
staff or any other relevant documents with regards to informing (or
not) customers affected by unplanned delays or closures about their
rights to request refunds under your Customer Charter.

Please consider this as a request under the Freedom of Information
Act 2000, to which you are therefore required by law to respond
within 20 days of receipt.

Yours faithfully

Tags: general rants, London, public services

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 7:48 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.