TfL Ref: FOI-0901-1718, FOI-1010-1718 and FOI-1138-1718

Thank you for your requests asking for correspondence.

Your request have been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our Information Access Policy. I can confirm that we hold the information you require. You asked for:

FOI-0901-1718

Can you please provide me with all email correspondence under an FOIA between the following dates and involving the following TfL staff:

1st January 2017 - 11th July 2017

(a) Edgerton Rodgers and Neil Billany

(b) Anand Nandha and Neil Billany

FOI-1010-1718

Emails that outline the below that have been either sent or received by the TfL email account of Helen Chapman

A.The role of Uber drivers in the booking process.

B.The function of smartphones used by Uber drivers.

The dates are 10/1/2014 to 30/8/2014

FOI-1138-1718

All emails between Uber and LTPH between 1 Jan 2016 till 30 May 2016.

Unfortunately, to provide all of 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 to answer FOI-1010-1718, we have conducted a remote search of all emails held by Helen Chapman that reference the word “Uber” within the specified timeframe and this produced in excess of 1700 hits. A ‘hit’ refers to an email found within our IT system that potentially fits within the scope of your request.

These emails would then need to be manually reviewed to determine whether they are in relation to either “the role of Uber drivers in the booking process” and/or “the function of smartphones used by Uber drivers”. Many of the hits are likely to be not relevant, duplicates, due to emails being repeated within email chains, as well as emails being forwarded internally for discussion during this time period. Therefore the actual number of emails covered by your request will be a sub-set of these hits. However, locating those that are relevant would require us to manually review all of them to determine whether the email, or email chain, is relevant to your request and then we would need to extract and compile all of those that meet your request

Additionally, your latest request (FOI-1138-1718) would similarly require further searches and a process of extracting and collating those that are relevant to your request.

It should be noted that our email search facility does not determine searches by department and so we can not run a remote search on “LTPH” but would need to conduct a search of the entire email archive across the full organisation and then manually review the results to determine which of the results were sent to/from individuals employed within the Taxi & Private Hire directorate at the time you have specified. We have not yet conducted this search but anticipate this to similarly produce several hundred hits at the very least.

We have therefore estimated that it would considerably exceed the cost limit to provide a response to your requests. 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. As we are issuing a refusal notice in relation to the aggregated cost limit we have put your request under case ref FOI-0901-1718 on hold to allow you an opportunity to revise your requests and prioritise which information you require within the 18 hour limit. We will not be processing this further until we have received your further clarification on which request for information you would like to prioritise.

Please note that under Regulation 5(2) of the Data Protection and Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004, we are permitted to aggregate requests where they relate to any extent to the same or similar information, and we consider that this is the case with your requests. This aggregation applies to any requests that are received within a sixty working day period. I think it is only fair to inform you that, once we receive your clarification, if we process your requests up to the cost limit of £450, then we would not be obliged to respond to any similar FOI requests for a period of sixty working days. However, this would not apply to requests for unrelated information.

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