FOI request detail

Correspondence on Uber licensing decision

Request ID: FOI-1642-1718
Date published: 17 October 2017

You asked

Dear Sir/Madam, Please provide a copy of correspondence from July to September 2017 involving General Manager, London Taxi & Private Hire Helen Chapman and/or Leon Daniels Managing Director, Surface Transport relating to the decision not to renew Uber's licence in London.

We answered

TfL Ref: FOI-1642-1718 & FOI-1670-1718

Thank you for your requests received by Transport for London (TfL) asking for correspondence.

Your requests have 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.

However, 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 conducted a remote search of correspondence held within our email archive sent to or from Helen Chapman and/or Leon Daniels that contains the word Uber and this produced thousands of results. We have therefore estimated that it would considerably exceed the appropriate limit to provide a response to your requests.

This is because we would need to manually inspect each of these emails to determine which are covered by your request and then collate accordingly. A brief review of these emails has shown that the majority of these results appear to be individual emails sent as part of an organised campaign in relation to the licensing decision. In addition to this, there will be many emails that are caught by the search as they are in relation to Uber but not specifically in relation to the licensing decision and so would not be covered by your request. This process of manually reviewing each email and then collating those that are relevant to your request would be significantly burdensome and would considerably exceed the cost limit.

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. 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.

Therefore we have not gone on to include the time that would be required to answer your request under case reference FOI-1670-1718 to allow you the opportunity to prioritise the information you require without prejudice to the time spent on answering your requests.

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. For example, by focusing on a narrowed period of time, only emails between specific individuals and a more specific keyword. Alternatively, you may wish to restrict your request only to FOI-1670-1718 which we expect to be able to answer within the cost limit.

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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