I would be grateful if you could send me all materials, including discursive emails, text messages, correspondence and memoranda, including correspondence with unions, relating to complaints against black cab drivers for aggressive, abusive or unprofessional behaviour.

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Thank you for advising us of the time period you are requesting information for.

Having considered your request in more detail, we expect that we would not be able to process such a broad request within a reasonable amount of time, even if we were to consider a time period much shorter than that which you have suggested.

You have asked for “all materials, including discursive emails, text messages, correspondence and memoranda, including correspondence with unions, relating to complaints against black cab drivers for aggressive, abusive or unprofessional behaviour”. Due to the broad scope of this request, we would need to carry out a remote search of all email accounts held by TfL, using a keyword search which could only be as general as ‘black cab’ or ‘taxi’. Such a search would provide a huge number of emails which would then need to be manually reviewed for their relevance to your request.

As I hope you can appreciate, this task would be huge, but would only cover emails – further searches would need to be carried out to cover additional information which may be covered by ‘all materials’.

Therefore, to provide the information you have requested would significantly exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, and as previously advised, 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’.

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. 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. For example, we are more likely to be able to answer a request asking for the number of complaints, or the number of licences which have been revoked, than a request asking for ‘all materials’.

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.

Yours sincerely

Graham Hurt

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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