Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 29 July 2017 asking for information about our total expenditure on rides using Uber for each year that that they been licensed as a minicab provider in London.
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 the information you require. You asked for:
how much money in total TfL has spent on rides using the Uber platform, for all users; staff/management/guests or other, for each year, since Uber has been licensed as a minicab provider in London by TfL.
Unfortunately, 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.
We have estimated that it would considerably exceed the appropriate limit to provide a response to this request. To be able to answer this, we would first need to locate all of the expenses under the category of “Taxi”. Then, the only way to obtain the information you require would be to manually search through the receipts of these journeys to determine those which are covered by your request and collate them accordingly. Such a task would take a considerable amount of time and vastly exceed the cost limit. Furthermore, receipts for journeys made prior to June 2016 are held in archive so these would need to be retrieved before they can be reviewed which would further increase the processing time of your request.
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. 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 and you might also consider limiting the time period covered by your request. We estimate that it will be possible to process your request within the cost limit if you were to narrow your timeframe to ‘from June 2016 onwards’ (since receipts for claims made from this time have been submitted electronically through our database) and specify only those employees graded Director and/or Managing Director.
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
Jasmine Howard
FOI Case Officer
Information Governance
Transport For London
