Request ID: FOI-0686-2122 Date published: 02 August 2021
You asked
• The sum total of driver dismissal notifications received from licensed private hire operators for the period of July 1, 2020 until December 31, 2020. Please also provide the number of such notifications received for this period from each of the following operators: Uber, Bolt, Ola Cabs.
• The sum total of driver dismissal notifications received from licensed private hire operators for the period of January 1, 2021 until June 30, 2020. Please also provide the number of such notifications received for this period from each of the following operators: Uber, Bolt, Ola Cabs.
We answered
Our Ref: FOI-0686-2122
Thank you for your request received on 4th July 2021 requesting information Transport for London (TfL) has received from licensed private hire operators.
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy.
You asked for:
The sum total of driver dismissal notifications received from licensed private hire operators for the period of July 1, 2020 until December 31, 2020. Please also provide the number of such notifications received for this period from each of the following operators: Uber, Bolt, Ola Cabs.
The sum total of driver dismissal notifications received from licensed private hire operators for the period of January 1, 2021 until June 30, 2021. Please also provide the number of such notifications received for this period from each of the following operators: Uber, Bolt, Ola Cabs.
We understand your request to mean the number drivers that have been dismissed from (a) all private hire operators and (b) Uber, Bolt, and Ola Cabs separately, in the periods stated.
We provide form PHV/105 for this purpose. However, the same form can also be used by an operator to inform TfL of any concerns or complaints they may have about a driver who has not been dismissed - for example, if a driver has been suspended from the operator’s booking platform, or the outcome of an investigation they have undertaken.
We have identified thousands of forms within the timeframes requested which would need to be manually reviewed to determine which were submitted for the purposes of notifying TfL of a driver dismissal.
Under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act TfL is not obliged to respond to a request if it would costs more than £450 to determine if the information is held, and to then locate, retrieve or extract that information from elsewhere. This is calculated at a rate of £25 per hour, equivalent to 18 hours work. Given the number of forms that we would need to manually review to answer your questions, we estimate that it would cost well in excess of the costs limit to provide the requested information.
To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit you may wish to consider reframing it to reduce the amount of time it would take us to source the requested information. For example, we can provide the total number of PHV105s received from the operators in the timeframes specified.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
David Wells FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
