1) how many penalty charges are being raised due to non-payment of ULEZ fees? A daily summary will suffice. 2) how does this compare to the rate of penalties generated by the Congestion Charge? A percentage comparison will be fine here 3) how many queries are you having to respond to daily due to ULEZ fees? 4) Finally, who decided not to refund fees paid in error? You have not had to deliver a service or incur a cost, and refunding (a presumably low volume of) fees is probably cheaper than sending a form letter and arguing with the few people like me who feel cheated by a poorly advertised and confusing tax.

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TfL Ref: 1832-1920

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 3 September 2019 asking for information about the ULEZ and Penalty Charge Notices (PCNs) issued.

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. Your questions and our replies are as below:

1. how many penalty charges are being raised due to non-payment of ULEZ fees? A daily summary will suffice.

    

2. how does this compare to the rate of penalties generated by the Congestion Charge? A percentage comparison will be fine here

    

    

   The ULEZ scheme was introduced on 8 April 2019. As the scheme was new, between 8 April and 10 May we issued warning notices rather than Penalty Charge Notices (PCNs). Please find attached the amount of ULEZ and Congestion Charge PCNs we issued between 11 May and 13 September.

    

3. how many queries are you having to respond to daily due to ULEZ fees?

    

    

   We do not hold this information as we don’t record specific customer queries regarding ULEZ fees. We do record other information like challenges against PCNs.

    

    

4. Finally, who decided not to refund fees paid in error? You have not had to deliver a service or incur a cost, and refunding (a presumably low volume of) fees is probably cheaper than sending a form letter and arguing with the few people like me who feel cheated by a poorly advertised and confusing tax.

The Scheme Order outlines what our legal requirements are and how we must administer the scheme. Section 10 - Refunds of charges - outlines that charges for a period of 5, 20 or 252 charging days can be refunded. The relevant section is copied below.

Refunds of charges

10.—(1) The purchaser of a licence for a period of 5, 20 or 252 charging days may surrender the licence and obtain a refund in accordance with the following provisions of this article.

There is no provision in the Scheme Order which states that we need to refund single daily charges and therefore we are not legally required to do so.

In addition The ULEZ and Congestion Charge operate using Automatic Number Plate Recognition technology. As a vehicle enters, leaves or drives within the zone its registration is recorded along with an image of the vehicle. At the end of the next working day, when the payment period has expired, the list of vehicles observed in the zone is compared against those vehicles for which a charge has been paid, meet the standards, are exempt from the charge or registered on an Auto Pay account. Where a match is found the image and record of the specific vehicle is deleted. If no match is found the details are retained for enforcement purposes.

As the records of all vehicles which have paid the daily charge are deleted we do not keep a record of when a payment has been made but the vehicle wasn’t driven in the zone. This would make verifying daily charge refund requests difficult.

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

Please see 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.

Yours sincerely

Sara Thomas

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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