Thank you for your email received on 14 April 2017 asking for information on taxi and private hire licensing. Please accept my apologies for the delay in responding.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our Information Access Policy. I can confirm that we hold the information you require. You asked for:

“Can I please have the data relating to Private hire & Hackney carriage drivers for "standing for hire" offence.

I would be grateful if you can break down the data to how many of these were alleged and how many were convicted in the last 5 years.”

To ensure the safety of the travelling public, taxi and private hire drivers must meet a range of strict criteria to ensure they are of good character. This is assessed on the basis of an enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check, information provided by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) and any other information that comes to our attention, including disclosures received from the police. Plying for hire offences are not recordable offences, so they would not appear on a DBS disclosure certificate.

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 doing this would take substantially longer than 18 hours to collate this data.

The police disclosures we receive for ‘plying for hire’ and ‘touting’ offences have been recorded by us in the same category as touting. To determine which offences specifically relate to ‘plying for hire’, we would need to manually check all relevant police disclosures that were received in the period requested. In addition, we would need to check individual driver records (in excess of 130,000 drivers) to determine whether a driver has declared such an offence either as part of their application or subsequently.

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

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 feel free 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
Information Governance
Transport For London