Dear Sir, under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 I would like copies of all emails and documentation regarding John Mason licensing Uber. In particular, his involvement in any due diligence carried out in respect of Uber’s electronic hailing. 2/ I would like to know who pays the credit card processing charge when using Uber? Is it Uber, the driver or does the passenger agree to a charge when downloading the app? 3/ What is the charge and does it correspond with taxis? 4/ Have any TFL managers, including John Mason, Peter Hendy, Garret Emerson, Helen Chapman, Peter Blake, Leon Daniels and Mike Brown ever recorded the receipt of any gifts or incentives, financial or otherwise, from Uber, Lyft or any other app-based transport providers before, during or after Uber’s licensing process? 5/ How many other app-based transport providers have applied for operating licenses and who are they? 6/ Does TFL intend to implement the Law Commission’s recommendation of replacing “plying for hire” with “here and now”? 7/ if so, when?

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TfL Ref: FOI-1994-1718

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 20 October 2017.

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.

Unfortunately, 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.

Your request asks for copies of all emails that relate to the licensing of Uber, as well as several other questions including the number of ’app-based transport providers’ that have applied for a Private Hire Operators licence. The process of locating, extracting and locating the information you have requested would far exceed the cost limit. You have not specified a timeframe for both of these aspects of your request and so we would need to search through every instance of an operator application that is recorded in any way for as far back as we have recorded and then manually collate a record of any that make reference to being an app based transport provider. Furthermore, the emails and documentation aspect of your request is similarly unfocussed and would entail significant manual searching of records and archived emails across the entire organisation within an unlimited period of time.

We have therefore estimated that it would considerably exceed the cost limit to provide a response to your request. 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 you may wish to prioritise your request for the precise information you require, as opposed to the wide and unfocussed approach taken in this request.

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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