Correspondence with US Embassy regarding Congestion Charge
Request ID: FOI-1356-2425 Date published: 14 August 2024
You asked
I am writing to request all correspondence between TfL's Commissioner and the Embassy of the United States of America - specifically regarding the Embassy's refusal to pay the congestion charge. The Embassy has an outstanding debt since 2003 of more than £14.6m in unpaid congestion charges.
Please could you disclose all written correspondence - in the form of letters or emails - relating to this issue up to the date of this request and since 9 May 2016? I am therefore interested in correspondence exchanged between the Embassy and Andy Lord, Andy Byford, and Mike Brown, during their respective tenures as Commissioner.
We answered
Our Ref: FOI-1356-2425
Thank you for your request received on 30 July 2024 asking for correspondence between TfL’s Commissioners with the US Embassy regarding outstanding Congestion Charge payments. Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy. When requests for email correspondence are received the FOI Case Management team are able to conduct company-wide email searches using keywords, dates and email addresses. The more specific a requester can be as to what they are looking for, the more we can narrow the search and therefore stand a better chance of a more relevant or focused result. A search will then return an amount of ‘hits’ which potentially contain information relating to the search terms used. Each ‘hit’ is a single email, although that email will often consist of a chain of emails containing the search term at least once. We have done an initial search for any emails held by TfL sent/received by the Commissioners, past and present, and can confirm that we do not hold any correspondence with the US Embassy in London about the Congestion Charge (or ‘non-payment of the Congestion Charge’). Please note that we are only able to search back to 2017 due to our retention policies. Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Gemma Jacob Senior FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
