Please send to me all correspondence TfL sent and received from Uber regarding the employment / worker status of Uber drivers between January 1 2014 and September 9, 2017.

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TfL Ref: FOI-1433-1718, FOI-1432-1718 and FOI-1431-1718

Thank you for your emails received by us on 10 September 2017.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. I can confirm we do hold the information you require.

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.

You asked for the following:

FOI-1431-1718: Please send to me all correspondence TfL sent and received from Uber regarding the employment / worker status of Uber drivers between January 1 2014 and September 9, 2017.

FOI-1432-1718: Please forward to me all correspondence between TfL and the Department for Transport from January 1 2014 and August 30, 2017 regarding the safety & risk of ride share services such as UberPool.

FOI-1433-1718: Please forward to me consultation submissions from [several listed organisations] to TfL for the recent private hire operator license fee consultation which closed last month:

We have conducted a search for emails covered by your request under case ref FOI-1431-1718. This search was for any and all emails sent to/from any email address with the suffix “@uber.com” that contained one or more of the following keywords: worker; employee; employment status; driver.

This search came back with in excess of 2,800 emails that potentially fit within the scope of your request. These emails would each need to be manually reviewed to determine whether they are relevant to your request. 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. A brief review of these results also determined that email items such as company circulars and receipts were caught by this search.

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 in that they relate to the functions of the Taxi & Private Hire directorate. 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.

To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider prioritising the information you require so that we can more easily locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking. For example you may wish to request only the information covered by FOI-1432-1718 and/or FOI-1433-1718; or for emails between specific individuals and/or on a specific subject in relation to FOI-1431-1718.

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

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