Our Ref:         FOI-0284-1920 / FOI-0226-1920 / FOI-0265-1920 / FOI-0264-1920 / FOI-0176-1920 / FOI-0063-1920 / FOI-3324-1819

Thank you for your e-mails asking for various pieces of information relating to our Taxi and Private Hire directorate.

Your requests have been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy.

Our records show that you have made 16 FOI requests to TfL in a continuous period of 48 working days (excluding bank holidays) up to and including the date of your most recent request of 27 April 2019. Because of this we are now applying an aggregate cost limit to the outstanding requests which we received from you between 18 February and 27 April 2019, inclusive.

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 of £450 provided for in the Freedom of Information (FOI) and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004. This is calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described.

We have estimated that, to date, it has cost £125 to provide a response to your earlier requests, equating to an estimated 5 hours spent locating, retrieving and compiling the information you requested. In addition to this, we have already issued a refusal based on the time it would take to provide a response to a request made in this period (FOI-3150-1819).

We believe to respond to your remaining outstanding requests would require at least 40 hours to retrieve, assess and compile the information at a further cost of £1000 totalling 63 hours of work at an overall cost of £1575. Two of your outstanding requests would in themselves exceed the appropriate limit.

In FOI-0266-1920, you have asked, ‘Can you please tell me in the last 6 months how many TfL licensed drivers have informed you that they will be attending the licensing drop in centre about any specific matter?’ The majority of people booking appointments are likely to be applicants, it would take a considerable amount of time to discern between applicant and license holder bookings. In addition to the time it would take to determine this, it would not include any other times we have been informed by drivers that they will be attending sessions – e.g. in other correspondence, via social media, or confirmation during ad hoc meetings.

FOI-0265-1920 refers to an incident in November 2018, when TfL was reportedly contacted by the Metropolitan Police to inform us that a TfL licensed taxi driver was about to commit suicide. In order to provide the requested information we would first need to identify the incident in question. We are unsure how long this would take as we have only been provided an approximate date and would have to make several enquiries to determine who may hold relevant information. We would then need to identify, locate, and retrieve any relevant correspondence. Due to the nature of the request we would also of course have to ensure any personal information contained within the correspondence had been redacted, and this would go beyond the standard redaction of names and contact details so would also take additional time.

Additionally, we believe that you are working in concert with another requester that has also submitted requests that are clearly similar in nature and are regarding the mental health of taxi and private hire drivers. The time taken to respond to those requests would be in addition to the estimate provided above. Because of this we are now applying an aggregate cost limit and refusing all of these outstanding requests under section 12 of the FOI Act. Please note any further requests that we receive within a 60 working day timeframe from you or the other requester may also be subject to consideration under section 12 of FOI.

While we appreciate there is a high level of interest in how we are regulating taxis and the private hire trade, there is a small team available to respond to these requests and the burden placed on them has to be balanced with their substantive roles. To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to prioritise the information you are most interested in and make a single request on a topic, rather than several requests in a short period of time in order to make the best use of the processing time available to you under the FOI Act.

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]