SINCE 8TH OF JANUARY 2020 TFL HAS STOPPED ACCEPTING IMPORT VEHICLES FOR PRIVATE HIRE LICENCE GIVING NO SATISFACTORY REASON. WE WANT TO KNOW THE INFORMATION UNDER WHICH LAW TFL HAS STOPPED THESE VEHICLE ACCEPTING FOR PRIVATE HIRE WHILE THESE VEHICLES COMPLIES WITH EURO 06 EMISSION RULES. PLEASE REPLY BRIEFLY WITH FULL LAW INFORMATION. THANK YOU

---

Our ref: FOI-1941-2021/GH & FOI-2138-2021/GH 

 

Thank you for your requests received by Transport for London (TfL) on 29 December 2020 and 24 January 2021, asking for information about a private hire vehicle ban on import vehicles.  

 

Your requests have been considered under the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and our information access policy.  

 

I can confirm that we do hold the information you require. However, 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. Section 12(4)(a) of the Act provides for the costs of complying with two or more requests made in a 60 working day period which are, to any extent, for the same or similar information to be combined.  

 

For example, you asked: 

 

5 IF TFL HAS ANY ISSUE WITH EURO 6 COMPLIANCE ON IMPORT VEHICLES. 

THEN PLEASE PROVIDE US INFORMATIONS,WHAT TFL HAS DONE TO SOLVE THIS ISSUE PLEASE PROVIDE US ALL CORRESPONDENCE TO AND FROM DVSA ( DRIVER AND VEHICLE LICENCING AGENCY) VCA (VEHICLE CERTIFICATION AGENCY) AND FROM ALL OTHER PARTIES INVOLVED IN THIS DECISION. 

 

In order to answer this part of your requests we conducted an email search for all emails to/from @vosa.gov.uk , @dvsa.gov.uk , vca.gov.uk between the dates 1/1/2018 and 25/1/2021 that contain either the keyword "emissions" OR "private hire". This search produced over 1,000 hits (the search tool stops once it gets to 1,000 hits so the total number will certainly be more than that) - it is clear that this would exceed the cost exemption. 

 

From a brief review it was clear that many of the hits would not be directly relevant to your request. For instance some emails related to freight, others related to driver investigations and various other matters and so the number of relevant hits will obviously be a small subsection of these results but the process of manually reviewing such a significant volume of hits to extract and collate those that are relevant would exceed the cost limit. We are therefore refusing both of these under section 12 of the FOI Act.  

  

You may find our response to a previous request on this subject useful. This response was sent in January 2020 and informs on our position on imported vehicles at that time. This response is published on our website here: 

 

https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transparency/freedom-of-information/foi-request-detail?referenceId=FOI-3855-1920  

 

Under the Freedom of Information process, you may only request recorded information, and TfL does not have to answer your question if it would require the creation of new information or the provision of a judgement, explanation, advice or opinion that was not already recorded at the time of your request.  You may therefore find it more useful to contact our Taxi and Private Hire team directly for an explanation of the current position outside of the FOI process.  

 

If you do wish to submit a refined Freedom of Information request, you should consider refining this to concentrate on matters which are of most importance to you, to help bring the cost to within the £450 limit.  

 

If you are considering submitting a further FOI request please think carefully about whether the request is essential at this current time, as answering FOI requests will require the use of limited resources and the attention of staff who could be supporting other essential activity. Where requests are made, please note that our response time may be impacted by the current situation.  

 

If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal. 

 

Yours sincerely 

 

Graham Hurt 

FOI Case Officer 

FOI Case Management Team 

General Counsel 

Transport for London

Back to top

---