Request ID: FOI-0777-2223 Date published: 26 July 2022
You asked
Revised request - FOI-0264-2223:
How many licence revocation decisions concerning private hire licence drivers working for Uber were made annually in 2019, 2020, and 2021?
And, in 2020 and 2021, how many of those revocation decisions were appealed?
And, in how many of those appealed cases did the driver win their appeal?
If this exceeds the acceptable time taken for a request, please could you shorten the timescale to 2, or 1 year, as appropriate.
We answered
Our Ref: FOI-0777-2223
Thank you for your request received on 1 July 2022 asking for information about Uber driver licence revocations.
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. I can confirm that we do hold the information you require. Unfortunately, to provide the information you have requested would still 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 in excess of 18 working hours to retrieve and compile the information you have requested. There have been 2,017 revocations in the requested timeframe, please see a breakdown by year in the table below:
Number of Revocations 2019 649 2020 574 2021 794
We do not centrally record which operator the PHV driver works for, in many cases they will work for multiple operators. Therefore, in order to extract the requested information we would need to manually review the associated driver files to determine what, if any, are caught by your request. We would also need to look at individual driver files to collate the information you have requested regarding appeals, in some cases this would be information held by the courts, not TfL.
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 request the information across all operators rather than singling out any one operator.
If you want to refine your request or make a Freedom of Information Act request in future, please bear in mind that the Freedom of Information Act allows you to request recorded information held by us. You should identify the information that you want as clearly and concisely as you can.
Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, we do not have to answer your question if it would require the creation of new information or the provision of a judgement, explanation, advice or opinion that was not already recorded at the time of your request.
Please note that we will not be taking further action until we receive your revised request.
In the meantime, if you have any queries or would like to discuss your request, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Gemma Jacob Senior FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
