Request ID: FOI-1679-2223 Date published: 09 November 2022
You asked
Email correspondence between TfL and Freenow between 1st January 2022 and 9th August 2022 regarding metered fares and regulations which have clearly been discussed when referring to Freenow’s email to their customers on Tue, 9 Aug 2022 at 11:36.
Please exclude all staff receipts from Freenow.
We answered
Our Ref: FOI-1679-2223
Thank you for your request received on 13 October 2022 asking for correspondence between TfL and Free Now regarding metered fares and regulations.
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.
However, we are refusing your request under section 14(1) of the Act. After reviewing a sample of the correspondence we consider that providing the requested information would place an unreasonable burden on us. Our principal duty is to provide an effective transport service for London and we consider that answering this request would represent a disproportionate effort. It would be a significant distraction from our work licensing and regulating London taxi and private hire industries, requiring re-allocation of already limited resources and placing an unacceptable burden on a small number of personnel. We do wish to clarify that whilst we consider that your request falls under section 14(1) of the FOI Act, this does not reflect a conclusion that it has been your intention to deliberately place an undue burden on our resources.
As advised in our response to your previous request, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) guidance states that one of the indicators of a request which may fall under section 14(1) is that it “appears to be part of a completely random approach, lacks any clear focus, or seems to have been solely designed for the purpose of ‘fishing’ for information without any idea of what might be revealed.”
The ICO guidance provides the following examples of a ‘fishing expedition’ request which may fall under section 14(1) if it:
• Imposes a burden by obliging the authority to sift through a substantial volume of information to isolate and extract the relevant details; • Encompasses information which is only of limited value because of the wide scope of the request; • Creates a burden by requiring the authority to spend a considerable amount of time considering any exemptions and redactions.
Our view is that all three of these examples apply in this instance.
The search we have carried out using the new parameters set in your request has identified 19 emails. While this is not a large number, the emails have a number of attachments which brings the total of pages that would need to be reviewed to almost 500. The actual emails themselves only account for 49 pages and are largely covering emails referring to the documents that are attached. From our initial review, these attachments would need to be fully reviewed and then redacted as they contain information that is not relevant to your request, that could be withheld as it may prejudice commercial interests and/or prejudice the exercise by any public authority of its functions (in this case of TfL’s role as regulator). We would need to review all of the emails and attachments in order to determine this.
We consider the burden of retrieving, reviewing and redacting the information would be disproportionate to the benefit of providing it. Therefore, due to the wide and unfocused scope of your request, we are refusing it under section 14 of the FOI Act. As this is already a narrower request to your original one, it may be more beneficial to ask specific questions on the topic rather than another request for correspondence.
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
