FOI request detail

race discrimination reports reported by or made to UBER in the last five years broken down by verbal / physical

Request ID: FOI-0385-2021
Date published: 01 July 2020

You asked

The number of Race discrimination reports made by Uber passengers about Uber in the last five years. Please also indicate whether the discrimination if any was verbal or physical.

We answered

TfL Ref: 0385-2021

Thank you for your request received received by Transport for London (TfL) on 18 June 2020 asking for information on the number of race discrimination reports made to TfL by Uber passengers about Uber in the last five years, differentiated between physical / verbal incidents.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy. I can confirm we do hold the information you require.

Unfortunately, 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 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 it would significantly exceed the cost limit to provide a response to your current request.

We record complaints received on our customer complaint database using broad categorisations depending on which transport mode / business area  / subject matter the complaint relates to. We can only access our Taxi and Private Hire (TPH) data on our current system which we started using, from 30th May 2017 onwards. Prior to this we used another system which we are no longer able to access easily or use the same search parameters which makes the two sets of data potentially unreliable and not easily compared.

From initial searches carried out, and from 30th May 2017 onwards we will need to manually check thousands of complaints to ascertain whether any of them meet the specific criteria you are interested in. We have no way to report on complaints in the breakdown you are interested in and so to collate this information would require a manual review of thousands of individual case notes and extract and collate those that meet the requirements of your request.

This process would considerably exceed the cost limit explained above and so is exempt from disclosure in accordance with section 12.

Please note the Government has announced a series of measures to tackle the coronavirus. It is essential for London, and in particular for all critical workers, that we continue to provide a safe transport network that enables them to make the journeys they need to. In current circumstances, we are not able to answer FOI requests readily and we ask that you please do not make a request to us at present.

Answering FOI requests will require the use of limited resources and the attention of staff who could be supporting other essential activity. In any event, please note that our response time will be affected by the current situation.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Sara Thomas

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

[email protected]

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