Freedom of Information request - Taxis booked for your passengers.
Request ID: FOI-0590-2223 Date published: 01 July 2022
You asked
Dear Transport for London,
I require a full list of all taxis that have been booked by you and paid for by you for your passengers in the past twelve months.
The list should include:
• origin station of the taxi journey
• destination station of the taxi journey
• date
• time
• amount of passengers in the taxi
• reason for booking the taxi
• taxi company that was used
• taxi cost that you paid
You should include information for all modes including, London Underground, London Overground, TFL Rail, Docklands Light Railway, Croydon Tramlink, etc.
If for any reason you are unable to go back twelve months then just go back as far as you are able to go.
Note i am only solely asking about taxis booked for passengers and i do not require details of taxis booked for your staff.
We answered
Our ref: FOI-0590-2223/GH
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 9 June 2022 asking for information about Taxis booked for passengers.
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy.
I can confirm we do hold the information you require. However, we are refusing your request under section 14(1) of the Act. After reviewing a sample of our records we consider that providing the requested information would place an unreasonable burden on us. Our principal duty is to provide an effective transport service for London and we consider that answering this request would represent a disproportionate effort. It would be a significant distraction from our work managing the TfL network, requiring re-allocation of already limited resources and placing an unacceptable burden on a small number of personnel. We do wish to clarify that whilst we consider that your request falls under section 14(1) of the FOI Act, this does not reflect a conclusion that it has been your intention to deliberately place an undue burden on our resources.
In order to answer your request in its current form, we would need staff members from each of the areas requested (London Underground, London Overground, TFL Rail, Docklands Light Railway, Croydon Tramlink, etc.) to search for and collate the relevant information. As you have requested detailed information relating to each Taxi journey (origin, destination, number of passengers, reason for booking the taxi etc), we would then need to manually review the details recorded for each entry and consider whether any exemptions might apply, such as in instances where the information could lead to the identification of individuals. As there would be hundreds of relevant records requiring such a review, this would take an excessive amount of time. We therefore consider the burden of retrieving, reviewing and redacting the information would be disproportionate to the benefit of providing it.
If you would like to re-submit a more focused, specific request then we will, of course, consider it. For example, a request for the overall number of relevant Taxi journeys and the costs incurred would not raise concerns around the potential provision of personal data and would take up significantly less resources to answer.
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
