Dear FOI Officer, For the last 24 months, up to the end of April, could you send me: - The total number of taxi and private hire journeys, and the total taxi and private hire spend from claimed by Transport for London staff. I would like the information broken down by month.

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Our ref: FOI-0146-2021/GH

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 1 May 2020 asking for information about taxi journeys claimed by TfL staff.

Your requests have been considered under the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and our information access policy.

I can confirm that we do hold the information you require. However, 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 requests 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. In this instance, we estimate that the time required to answer your request would exceed 18 hours which, at £25 per hour (the rate stipulated by the Regulations), exceeds the ‘appropriate limit’.

Claims for reimbursement of taxi and private hire fares can be submitted in batches when several trips are required. Therefore to answer your request we would need to manually look at each claim to ascertain the number of journeys included. Claims can also be recorded under the taxi/private hire fares category when the include such a journey, but may also include other expenditure, and these would also need to be manually assessed. For the last 24 months there are over 600 claims which would need to be manually assessed to answer your request, and this would easily exceed the ‘appropriate limit’.

To help bring the cost of responding to your requests within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider refining your requests to concentrate on matters which are important to you.

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. If you have specific questions relating to these topics we may be more easily able to respond to these than to a request for any information held.

If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Graham Hurt

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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