On February 28th a delegation of IWGB union officials including [ ], [ ] and [ ] met with Transport Commissioner Mike Brown to discuss the welfare of private hire drivers. At the meeting Mike Brown stated that TfL had commissioned its own legal opinion on the regulatory and enforcement powers (and limitations thereof) to protect the worker rights of licensed private hire drivers. Commissioner Brown promised to release that opinion to us so that union lawyers may consider its merits in full with a view towards achieving the same understanding or presenting an alternative opinion. To date the Commissioner has not honoured that commitment therefore we now make a freedom of information request for all legal opinions, correspondence and analysis relating to TfL's consideration of its regulatory and enforcement powers to protect licensed private hire drivers from exploitation and towards protecting their worker rights.

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TfL Ref: FOI-1050-1920

Thank you for your email of 9th July 2019 asking for information about TfL’s regulatory powers for worker rights protections for private hire drivers.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy.

Specifically you asked:

“At the meeting [of 28th February 2019] Mike Brown stated that TfL had commissioned its own legal opinion on the regulatory and enforcement powers (and limitations thereof) to protect the worker rights of licensed private hire drivers.…we now make a freedom of information request for all legal opinions, correspondence and analysis relating to TfL's consideration of its regulatory and enforcement powers to protect licensed private hire drivers from exploitation and towards protecting their worker rights.”

As set out in our previous correspondence with the IWGB – for example,[  ] recent email of 5th June 2019 in response to your email of 20th May 2019 - TfL has not commissioned its own specific legal opinion on this matter. We do not therefore hold the information requested for that aspect of your request

In regard to the request for “all….correspondence and analysis” on this same subject, we estimate that to provide the information 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, and then locating, retrieving or 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 – equivalent to 18 hours work.

With no indication of timeframe or the correspondents that you think may be relevant, there is no easy way for us to locate all such information. TfL may potentially have corresponded with any number of individuals across our 19 year history on this subject, in a number of different formats (both electronically and in hard-copy). While the sum total of that correspondence may be relatively limited (albeit it is impossible to know for sure without actually locating it), the process of searching for everything that would fall under the scope of your request would be convoluted and excessive, and we do not believe it would be possible within the 18-hour limit.

You may therefore wish to refine or narrow the scope of your request to bring it within the parameters of the costs limit. For example, you may wish to restrict it to a particular time period, to specific correspondents, or to a more narrowly defined subject area. We would then reconsider any such request in accordance with the requirements of the FOI Act.

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

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