FOI request detail

Fuel Crisis

Request ID: FOI-1483-2122
Date published: 10 November 2021

You asked

Can you please treat this email as an FOI. I have been informed by the DfT that at some stage during the past 21 years the priority user list for fuel access in a fuel emergency has been changed and that taxis are no longer on the priority list. Can you please supply the following information • Copies of any communications between TfL and either the DFT or BEIS or their predecessors relating to the priority user list. • Copies of any consultations or responses in relation to the same • Any assessments done around fuel access including any EQIA (or similar) Can you please provide this information back to Jan 2001. The last fuel crisis was in Sept 2000 and it has changed since so that should be the time frame.

We answered

Our ref: FOI-1483-2122/GH
 
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 14 October 2021 asking for information about fuel priority lists.
 
To establish whether we hold 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 requests 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. In this instance, we estimate that the time required to answer your request would exceed 18 hours which, at £25 per hour (the rate stipulated by the Regulations), exceeds the ‘appropriate limit’.
 
To locate the information you have requested, we conducted a remote email search of several key employees within TPH using the keywords “Fuel shortage”; “priority access”; “taxi”; “hackney carriage”; “Liquid and Gaseous Fuel (Designated Filling Stations and Fuel Depots) Order 2000” and “Energy Act 1976”. The search using these parameters resulted in zero hits. A further TfL-wide search was therefore carried out for anything to/from @dft.gov.uk or @beis.gov.uk that contained the keywords “fuel” AND “taxi” and this returned 1,245 hits. Each ‘hit’ is a single email, although that email will often consist of a chain of emails containing the search term at least once.
 
From briefly reviewing these hits it was clear that a significant majority would not have been relevant to your request and related to TfL services in the context of the recent fuel distribution situation. However to complete your request each of the hits would need to be manually reviewed to ascertain this. Initial reviews indicate that it is highly likely there would be very few results that are of relevance within that broader search. For such a large number of results, ascertaining whether we hold any relevant information would exceed the cost limit explained above.
 
It is also important to note that our email retention policy is 7 years, and therefore we would not hold any emails which were sent or received more than 7 years ago.
 
To help bring the cost of responding to your requests within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider refining your request to a more specific timescale including the most precise keywords to assist with locating information that is of interest.
 
If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
 
Yours sincerely
 
Graham Hurt
FOI Case Officer
FOI Case Management Team
General Counsel
Transport for London
 

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