TfL Ref:  FOI-2017-1617

Thank you for your email received by us on 17 January 2017 asking for information about sexual offences committed by taxi and private hire 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 we do hold some of the information you require. You asked for:

All information and stats relating to sexual assaults by Taxi and Private Hire drivers outside of the sub-category "journey-related" from 2012 to the present time.

Please include the Operators to which these drivers were attached at the time of the offence(s).

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.

We have estimated that it would considerably exceed the appropriate limit to provide a response to this request. This is because we would need to manually inspect the records of those taxi and private hire drivers where TfL has been informed of a sexual offence. Where the operator details have not been provided by the police, we would also need to cross reference these records with the information provided to us by operators. We have estimated that this would take a minimum of 36 hours to collate this data.

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. If you want to refine your request or make a Freedom of Information Act request in future, please bear in mind that the Freedom of Information Act allows you to request recorded information held by us. You should identify the information that you want as clearly and concisely as you can and you might also consider limiting the time period covered by your request. As we have to manually check the records of drivers, we can approximately respond to this request covering 2 years data. Please note that the data will be from the police disclosures TfL has received from police and will not be cross referenced with the Met’s data in the way that the journey related data was.

Please note that for the vast majority, the operator details are not available as we only started to collect this from July 2016 following the PHV regulatory changes. However, in any case, the disclosure usually provides us with date of arrest/conviction/caution and not always the date of offence so we could not cross reference this with the operator upload data we receive to see who the driver was working for at the time of the offence.

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