Great Western Coffee Shop

A taxi reversed into my car by the taxi rank at Weston-Super-Mare station and denied he was liable saying I drove into him.  The area is covered by CCTV and my insurance company have submitted a written request (to FGW Head Office I think) eight days ago for the CCTV footage to be downloaded and supplied to them.  In a recent phone call to my insurer they said that some companies have a policy of not releasing CCTV.  At the moment they are still waiting for a response to the request.

Does anybody know please if FGW have a policy on release of CCTV and how long it might generally take?  I'd also be interested to know what it would cost - although my insurer will cover this.

Thanks in advance.  Cheers.  Bruce.

Don't know for sure, but some TOCs only release to a BTP request.

Thanks for your reply.  What are TOC and BTP please?

Train Operating Company and British Transport Police.

Thanks.  I'm optimistic that CCTV download will supplied as the station staff who were very helpful said that the procedure was for my insurer to submit a written request.  Sounds like it has been done before.  Fingers crossed.  It would just be nice to have confirmation that this shouldn't be a problem.

Meanwhile, may I offer you a warm welcome to the Coffee Shop forum, thornebt.

Thanks for posting your enquiry, and please do let us know what happens - this could be useful for others in a similar situation.

Thanks for the welcome Chris.  An update - My insurance company had no response from FGW so they phoned the Head Office.  They found that they could obtain the CCTV footage by paying just a ^10 fee.  However, they advised me that it would take about a month to raise a cheque and obtain the CCTV (seems a ridiculous timeframe!) so I phoned FGW myself and will pay the ^10 over the phone when they ring back to say they have located the footage.

It is good news that FGW will release CCTV (by post on a DVD) and it only costs ^10.  Some companies will not release CCTV at all - due to the Data Protection Act I believe.  So if any forum members get their car bumped in the car park or whatever just phone FGW head office.  I guess it would help if you have some idea of time that the incident happened.  I am in the process of getting onboard cameras for my car.  Only costs about ^50 and it would have provided the necessary evidence if I had them when the incident happened!

I think I can explain the ridiculous timeframe.

If it's the same time of system installed in other ex-Wessex stations, the footage can only be downloaded by staff from Telent.  They have to do it locally at the station and even when they are connected directly to the network in the same cabinet it takes forever to do.  And that assuming it doesn't fail and they have to start again!  It helps a lot if the exact time and date can be given as that way they only have to download a couple-of-hour chunk, but I had in the past engineers with me from about 8 in the morning till maybe 5 in the afternoon to download a whole night footage.

And this is a system that was installed about 4 years ago!

From the basis of the ^10 fee and requirement to request in writing it sounds like they are providing the CCTV footage through a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR). CCTV footage of you is covered by a DSAR request. This gives them a maximum of 40 days to provide the footage.

But this was of an inanimate object, not a person, and I don't think that's covered under DSAR?

Whatever, ^10 is damn good value. Pah! to your insurance company needing a month to raise a ^10 cheque though!

Depends whether the car's owner features in the footage. I guess he will at least when he parked it and pulled away as a minimum as we don't have driverless cars as yet.

Butr that's not the footage requested....

But the footage requested will contain the required incident and if continuation of the footage the incident will also feature.
However it has not been clarified whether the OP was present at the time, if the taxi driver alleges he was moving forward at the time then its safe to say he was present in the footage at the time of the incident.

Fair comment....

I just hope after all this that FGW still have the footage and it has not been wiped so the storage can be reused....

Thanks for your feedback.  I can clarify that I had just pulled up outside the station.  I was definitely stationary - my automatic gearbox was in park.  The taxi reversed into me.  A few seconds after the collision myself and my passenger and the taxi driver all got out of our vehicles.  So we would all feature in the footage.  It all happened eleven days ago.

I assumed that the CCTV would be downloaded at a central CCTV centre rather than at the station.  I really don't know.  I have had another look on the web and found that ^10 is the maximum that organisations can charge for providing information held on individuals (with some exceptions) under the Data Protection Act.  My concern now is that they might just delay the matter until the CCTV is no longer available.  It would clearly cost more than ^10 to provide the footage, especially if it is held on a DVR at the railway station. 

FGW have taken all the incident details from me on Friday but said they would phone me back to take the ^10 payment.  I thought that this delay would be whilst they checked that they had the footage - but perhaps it's a delaying tactic.