Our Ref:         FOI-0251-1920 / FOI-0252-1920 / FOI-0346-1920 / FOI-0347-1920 / FOI-0350-1920

Thank you for your e-mails asking for various pieces of information about taxis and mental health issues.

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

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. Section 12(4)(a) of the Act provides for the costs of complying with two or more requests made in a 60 working day period which are, to any extent, for the same or similar information to be combined. Section 12(4)(b) provides for requests made by different people acting in concert, or in pursuance of a campaign to be considered together under section 12.

Our records show that you have made five FOI requests to TfL within a one week, up to and including the date of your most recent requests of 1 May 2019. Additionally, we believe that you are working in concert with another requester that has also submitted requests that are clearly similar in nature which, in total, accounts for 12 open requests from persons we believe to be acting on concert. We are therefore 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]