TfL Ref: 1161-1920

Thank you for your email received by us on 22 July 2019 asking for information about complaints against black-cab drivers over the last five years.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy. You asked for:

- The number and type of complaints against black-cab drivers for the last five years that data is held

If it is not possible to answer this request in its entirety due to one or more questions exceeding the cost of compliance limits identified in Section 12, please answer the ones that do not exceed the limits and disregard the ones that do.

If it is not possible to provide any of the information requested due to the request exceeding the cost of compliance limits identified in Section 12, please provide advice and assistance, under your Section 16 obligations, as to how I can refine my request to be included in the scope of the Act.

In any case, if you can identify ways that my request could be refined please provide further advice and assistance to indicate this.

Based on the following categories, which were used to search for this information under: ‘complaint/safety issues’, under ‘Taxi and Private Hire’ area, followed by keywords ‘black cab’ and ‘black taxi’, a representative sample was checked for relevance, and then extrapolated accordingly.

Having analysed our representative sample, we estimate that 5201 complaints about black cab drivers were recorded from 1 July 2017 to 31 July 2019. We are unable to provide the information you are seeking for a five year period due to a change in correspondence reporting systems towards the end of July 2017.

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 changed our correspondence reporting systems towards the end of July 2017 and so are unable to provide information before that date. However, for information recorded since then it isn’t possible to reliably report on complaints that specifically relate to Taxi drivers. As a result, to provide an answer to your request would require us to manually review thousands of complaints that relate to Taxi and Private Hire and then extract and collate those that are relevant to your request.

To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider substantially narrowing its scope so that we can more easily locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking. We may be able to provide information using a keyword search (such as Taxi driver), however it remains possible that any such figure will include complaints regarding a private hire driver that happens to mention the term “taxi driver” in any context. Therefore any such result could not be considered completely accurate.

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, specifying the types of document that you are looking for. You might also consider limiting your request to a particular period of time, geographical area or specific departments of the organisation.

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.

- The number and type of actions taken; including the number of referrals to other authorities, such as the police.

Further to the above cost exemption, providing the above would require us to manually review every complaint in detail against the driver file to locate, extract and collate any instances that met the requirement of your request. Therefore the cost exemption applies both collectively and individually to the above questions.

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 as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.

Yours sincerely

Jasmine Howard
FOI Case Officer
Information Governance
Transport For London