Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 I request the following information: a) How many taxi drivers have 12 or more points on their driving licence but retain entitlement to drive b) A discrete breakdown of the number of points held in part (a) as well as by gender c) Any information held regarding reasons for them retaining a licence in these circumstances

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TfL Ref: FOI-1808-1819

Thank you for your email received on 9 October asking for information regarding licensed taxi drivers.

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

a) How many taxi drivers have 12 or more points on their driving licence but retain entitlement to drive

b) A discrete breakdown of the number of points held in part (a) as well as by gender

c) Any information held regarding reasons for them retaining a licence in these circumstances

To ensure the safety of the travelling public, taxi and private hire drivers must meet a range of strict criteria to ensure they are of good character. This is assessed on the basis of an enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check submitted as part of a licence application, information provided by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) and any other information that comes to our attention.

Licensed drivers are obliged to notify us within 21 days if they have been disqualified from driving or have been cautioned, charged, or convicted of any criminal offence - including any road traffic offences. This requirement is clearly stated in the letter that accompanies all driver licences.

Regarding driving disqualification, our internal licensing guidance states that: “A driver cannot hold a taxi or private driver’s licence without a DVLA driving licence, therefore disqualification from driving automatically results in revocation of the licence.”

“In normal circumstances any driver accumulating 12 penalty points on their driving licence in a three year period will be disqualified from driving for a minimum of six months. However, the courts have the discretion not to disqualify in exceptional hardship. Where this discretion is exercised and the driver has not been convicted of more than one major offence TfL will not revoke the driver’s licence but will issue a written warning highlighting the risk of revocation should the driver receive further penalty points and is subsequently disqualified.”

I can confirm that although we hold the information you have requested, to provide it would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, as we would need to check approximately 23,485 individual taxi driver records to identify, extract and collate this information. The information requested is not held in a reportable format and we have estimated that manually checking this data would considerably exceed the set limit.

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 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.

The attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.

If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for some reason, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours sincerely

Melissa Nichols

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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