Number of diabetic taxi drivers registered with TFL
Request ID: FOI-1420-2122 Date published: 01 November 2021
You asked
Hello
To support a research article, I'd be grateful if you could advise how many individual drivers have been registered with and permitted by TFL
- to drive a taxi within London
- and how many of those identified as diabetic,
- with figures presented for each year from 2015 through 2020 inclusive.
Additionally, given we are now in Q3 2021, and understanding that both Brexit and the pandemic may have grossly and unusually impacted normal annual trends and driver applications, can you please confirm how many
- registered diabetic taxi drivers and
- total registered taxi drivers
are registered with TFL to drive within London, at the current time, or at the last polling/record date?
Many thanks
We answered
Our Ref: FOI-1420-2122
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and TfL’s information access policy. I can confirm we do hold the information you require.
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 have estimated that it would cost in excess of £450 to provide a response to your current request. This is because it is estimated that it would take over 18 working hours to retrieve and compile the information you have requested. As of 24 October 2021 there are 20,070 licensed taxi drivers. The information you have requested is not held centrally and we would have to review the records for all of the currently licensed London Taxi drivers, to first determine whether the information is held, and then extract and collate the information you have requested.
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. At present, the main issue we have with providing the information you have required is the breakdown by nationality. Removing this part of your request will hopefully allow us to process the rest of your request.
Please note that we will not be taking further action until we receive your revised request.
If you are considering submitting a further FOI request please think carefully about whether the request is essential at this current time, as answering FOI requests will require the use of limited resources and the attention of staff who could be supporting other essential activity. Where requests are made, please note that our response time may be impacted by the current situation.
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
