By ‘taxi driver’ I refer to all licensed taxi and private hire vehicles. 1. How many taxi drivers are licenced with your local authority? 2. How many of those taxi drivers work for Uber? 3. How many taxi drivers licenced in your local authority have criminal convictions? 4. For each driver, please list their criminal convictions. 5. How many official letters have you received from the Police warning the local authority to suspend a driver’s licence? (In the last year.) 5a. Please stipulate what police force sent each letter. 6. Please attach all of the letters you have received in the past year from the police warning you to suspend their licence to drive a taxi/private-hire car.

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Our ref: FOI-0327-1819/GH

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 9 May 2018 asking for information about Taxi drivers.

Your request has 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 just the parts of your request which relate to convictions, would exceed 18 hours which, at £25 per hour (the rate stipulated by the Regulations), exceeds the ‘appropriate limit’.

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 submitted as part of a licence application, information provided by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) and any other information that comes to our attention.

Once a decision regarding a driver's application has been made the results of the DBS check have to be destroyed. This is in accordance with the DBS Code of Practice which has statutory backing. Therefore, we do not hold all details of convictions and cautions only those that have been declared to us by the driver.

Licensed drivers are obliged to notify us within 21 days if they have been disqualified from driving or have been cautioned, charged, or convicted of any criminal offence - including any road traffic offences. This requirement is clearly stated in the letter that accompanies all driver licences.

Therefore to provide you with the requested information on convictions would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, as we would need to check in excess of 140,000 individual taxi and private hire driver records to identify, extract and collate this information. The information requested is not held in a reportable format and we have estimated that manually checking this data would considerably exceed the set limit. This cost limit estimate only considers the questions regarding taxi drivers with criminal convictions. The other questions you have raised would clearly add to the work required and the time it would take to provide your with a response.

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 us. 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 the organisation.

Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, we do 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 this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for some reason, please do not hesitate to contact me.

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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