TfL Ref: 1143-1920

Thank you for your request received by us on 19 and 31 July 2019 asking for information about Transport for London (TfL) and the Lyft, Grab, Go-jek or Didi Chuxing transportation companies.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. You asked for the following in response to our requests for clarification on which areas of interest and types of communication this is in reference to:

Have TfL held meetings or had correspondence and phone calls with Lyft representatives over the past six months?
Over the past six months has TfL held meetings or had correspondence and phone calls with representatives from the following companies: Lyft, Grab, Go-jek or Didi Chuxing? If so, please could I receive any emails and meeting notes/minutes regarding the above?
I am interested in everything the companies might be talking about with TfL

However, we are refusing your request under section 14(1) of the Act. After reviewing a sample of the documents we hold, we consider that providing the requested information would place an unreasonable burden on us. Our principal duty is to provide an effective transport service for London and we consider that answering this request would represent a disproportionate effort. It would be a significant distraction from our work managing the TfL network, requiring re-allocation of already limited resources and placing an unacceptable burden on a small number of personnel. We do wish to clarify that whilst we consider that your request falls under section 14(1) of the FOI Act, this does not reflect a conclusion that it has been your intention to deliberately place an undue burden on our resources.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) guidance states that one of the indicators of a request which may fall under section 14(1) is that it “appears to be part of a completely random approach, lacks any clear focus, or seems to have been solely designed for the purpose of ‘fishing’ for information without any idea of what might be revealed.”

The ICO guidance provides the following examples of a ‘fishing expedition’ request which may fall under section 14(1) if it:
· Imposes a burden by obliging the authority to sift through a substantial volume of information to isolate and extract the relevant details;
· Encompasses information which is only of limited value because of the wide scope of the request;
· Creates a burden by requiring the authority to spend a considerable amount of time considering any exemptions and redactions.

Our view is that all three of these examples apply in this instance.

We conducted a remote email search for emails involving these companies and this provided a total of 504 hits. A ‘hit’ refers to an email file which may consist of a single email or a chain of emails. Each of these hits would need to manually reviewed and any relevant information collated into a format suitable for public disclosure for the purposes of your request.

Due to the nature of correspondence it is certain that there will be a significant amount of personal data that requires redaction and it is also likely we would need to consider one or more other exemptions that may apply to information caught by such a broad and non-specific search, such as section 43(2) and/or section 41.

Whilst transparency is a vital part of our work, we consider that to undertake the necessary review and redaction needed to answer this request would place an unreasonable burden on our resources. Therefore, due to the wide ranging scope of your request, we are refusing it under section14 of the FOI Act. If you would like to re-submit your request and ask for meeting notes/minutes with the aforementioned companies then we will, of course, consider it.

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