Please list the total amount spent by Transport for London employees on Uber taxi journeys for business purposes in each of the following financial years: 2014-15 2015-16 2016-17

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TfL Ref: FOI-1558-1718 and FOI-1645-1718

Thank you for your requests received by Transport for London (TfL) asking for information about expenditure.

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. You asked:

Please list the total amount spent by Transport for London employees on Uber and black cab journeys for business purposes in each of the following financial years:

2014-15

2015-16

2016-17

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 considerably exceed the appropriate limit to provide a response to this request. To be able to answer this, we would first need to locate all of the expenses under the category of “Taxi”. Then, the only way to obtain the information you require would be to manually search through the receipts of these journeys to determine those which are covered by your request and collate them accordingly. This is because the way these claims are recorded does not differentiate between Taxi or Private Hire journeys, or even journeys that take place in London or elsewhere, and so only the receipt would be able to provide this detail. Such a task would take a considerable amount of time and vastly exceed the cost limit. Furthermore, the majority of receipts for claims made within the scope of your request are held in archive so these would need to be retrieved before they can be reviewed which would further increase the processing time of your request.

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. 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 and you might also consider limiting the time period covered by your request. We estimate that it will be possible to process your request within the cost limit if you were to narrow your timeframe and/or specify only those employees graded Managing Director.

You may be interested to note that we publish our Chief Officers’ expenses at the following link: https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/publications-and-reports/chief-officers-expenses

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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