How many Private Hire Driver Licences Has been Issued, to an applicants on a United Kingdom, Home Office Visa. Between 01/08/2023 to 30/10/2023.
Request ID: FOI-0644-2425 Date published: 18 June 2024
You asked
F/O from 0434-2425
Good Evening.
Narrowed to 3 Months.
I, , a British Citizen, hereby request Under freedom of Information Act, 2000.
Request from TfL, How many Private Hire Driver Licences Has been Issued, to an applicants on a United Kingdom, Home Office Visa. Between 01/08/2023 to 30/10/2023.
Having Filed all Unreasonable Denials of FOI request, I have received from TfL, I Have Narrowed my request to three Months.
Will you share this time, what are getting hidden from British public, Am I dealing with a prestigious British Institution, or a Polluted, Corrupted Full of Filth Slumps Country's Institution.
What are you really hiding.
I narrowed to three months, of the same request, 01/08/2023 to 30/1/2023.
Use SQL Command and Asterisk, to narrow Data, It will take me 10 seconds to search one TB of data.
So, what are getting hidden in there, am I dealing with a British Institution, or a Polluted, Corrupted full of filthy Slumps Country.
Best regards.
We answered
TfL Ref: 0644-2425
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 24 May 2024 asking for information about how many private hire licences TfL has issued to applicants who hold a United Kingdom immigration visa from 1 August to 30 October 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 three month period would equate to us having to review approximately 7,200 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 previously advised, 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 approximately 1,000 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
