Taxi and Private Hire Drivers are non UK, EU & EEU Citizens, working on a Visa.
Request ID: FOI-0434-2425 Date published: 24 May 2024
You asked
F/O from 0004-2425
Good Evening.
Note;
TfL; Stands for transport for London.
PHL; Stands for Private Hire Licence.
Could you please, discharge TfL duty of my right to Information under freedom of Information Act.
Here is once again narrowed request; to one year.
How many ? Driver PHL has TfL issued to applicants who Hold United Kingdom immigration Visa ?
From, 01/01/2023 to 31/12/2023.
Use, SQL Command and Asterisk. please stop pussyfooting around, I could in a 1TB, Data.
I understand you are Not, Emma Flint or Sara Thomas, it can be an Aliases because, such sentence "to explain a little further" is not a British Etiquette, and your suggestion example of to request information of Cars, instead of people, that is Not a typical British habit.
We answered
TfL Ref: 0434-2425
Thank you for your further request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 6 May 2024 asking ‘How many private hire licences has TfL issued to applicants who hold a United Kingdom immigration Visa from 01/01/2023 to 31/12/2023.
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 hold the information you require.
Unfortunately, as before, to provide this information 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 cost over £450 to provide a response to your current request. This is because it is estimated that it would take over 18 working hours to retrieve and compile the information you have requested.
We appreciate that you have again narrowed the scope of your request, however for us to even provide the information across a one year period would equate to us having to review 35,500 licensed drivers – this is based on the duration of a private hire driver licence being three years (for the vast majority of drivers) and there are currently 106,575 private hire drivers licenced with us. As advised previously, we simply do not hold the information requested in a reportable format and would need to manually review thousands of licences to answer your questions. To give you an idea of scale, we receive around 1000 licence applications per week.
As we have advised before, part of our licensing criteria is to ensure that applicants/drivers have the right to work and reside in the UK.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Sara Thomas FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
