TfL Ref: FOI-0721-1718 

Thank you for your letter received on 20 June 2017 requesting information about your Taxi and Private Hire (TPH) application and customer complaints.

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 some of the information you requested. You asked:

What reason the Medical Board has for asking for the Left Ventricles Ejection Fractions of my heart….? I want to know what parts of the DVLA group guidelines help the Medical Board understand my underlying condition.

In accordance with the FOI Act, we are not obliged to supply you with copies of your own personal information as it is subject to a statutory exemption to the right of access to information under section 40(1). The exemption applies because an FOI response is a disclosure to the general public so access to your own personal information is handled under separate legislation. Our TPH department will contact you and will deal with this query directly.

Which department deals with complaints…?

Our Customer Experience department deals with customer complaints.

What is TfL’s policy on staff rudeness and failure to reply to customer’s correspondence…?

TfL's policy on staff rudeness and failure to reply to customer's correspondence is set out in our customer promise, which you can find on our website: https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/our-customer-commitments

Our customer promise

•We will put our customers at the centre of everything we do by providing a high-quality service to everyone who contacts us

•We want to hear from you, as we value every piece of feedback we receive

•Your feedback can take the form of either a comment or suggestion, and may be an expression of your satisfaction or a complaint about our services

•We are committed to being accessible to every customer and will provide you with a timely, clear and full response

•We will listen to your feedback and take action to improve your experience in the future

Our complaint standards

•We will acknowledge receipt of your contact and keep you informed on the progress of your case

•We will aim to resolve all your issues in one go

•We will treat you as an individual and address your specific needs

•We will communicate with you in a style that is engaging and easy to understand

•We will actively use your feedback to fix problems and drive improvements to our services

We will reply to you efficiently and keep you updated

We're committed to resolving your enquiry the first time you contact us.

We will acknowledge all contacts within two working days and aim to provide a full response within ten working days.

If we need more time to investigate your enquiry, we will let you know how long it will take and keep you updated on the progress of your case.

Number of complaints made by Taxi drivers in the last two years…?

Unfortunately to provide you with the information you have requested 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 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’.

This is because we would have to manually go through every complaint and match our records to see whether they are a registered taxi driver, of which there are over 60,000.

To help bring the cost of responding to your requests within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider refining your request to concentrate on a specific type of complaint over a shorter time period.

If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for some reason, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.

Yours sincerely,

Melissa Nichols

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London