TfL Ref: FOI-0772-1718

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 29 June 2017 asking for information about meetings and correspondence.

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 information covered by your request.

However, to provide 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 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.

In order for us to answer this request we would need to search the email accounts of several individuals as well as manually review all documents relating to meetings held between the Commissioner, and other members of staff, and the Department for Transport, including any letters sent. It is worth noting that the issue of capping may not necessarily be the ‘agenda item’ or focus of any specific meeting, letter, email or discussion but may have been included within discussions on related Private Hire issues such as cross border hiring and so we would need to manually review everything we hold to determine whether it is relevant to your request and collate accordingly.

Therefore, under section 12 of the FOI Act, we are not obliged to comply with a request if we estimate that the cost of these activities would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450.

To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider narrowing its scope so that we can more easily locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking. For example, you may wish to limit your request to specific individuals and/or only to emails on this specific subject, including any identifying keyword(s) you would like us to search on.

specifically for external emails, emails featuring a more specific keyword(s) and/or over a narrowed period of time

.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Lee Hill

Senior FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London