FOI request detail

all correspondence involving Helen Chapman, Leon Daniels, and or anyone in their teams

Request ID: FOI-2028-1718
Date published: 17 November 2017

You asked

I would like to follow your advice and therefore drop FOI 1642-1718 and proceed with FOI-1670-1718 which you mention can be responded to within the cost limit, namely: Please provide a copy of all correspondence involving Helen Chapman, Leon Daniels, and or anyone in their teams relating to the August 2017 meeting held between Transport for London and Uber. Please also provide a copy of the correspondence sent by Uber to TfL in relation to this meeting.

We answered

TfL Ref: FOI-2028-1718 and FOI-2128-1718

Thank you for your emails received by us on 23 October and 7 November 2017 asking for correspondence.

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

FOI-2028-1718

Please provide a copy of all correspondence involving Helen Chapman, Leon Daniels, and or anyone in their teams relating to the August 2017 meeting held between Transport for London and Uber. Please also provide a copy of the correspondence sent by Uber to TfL in relation to this meeting.

FOI-2128-1718

Please provide a copy of all correspondence and documentation between September 25th until the present day involving Commissioner Mike Brown, Helen Chapman, anyone in her team and/or Uber regarding Uber’s licence in London. Please also provide a copy of the minutes of the meeting which took place between Brown and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi on October 3.

Unfortunately, to provide all of the information you have requested in the above requests 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.

In order to answer FOI-2028-1718 we conducted an initial search of the mailboxes of those staff likely to hold information relevant to your request for anything held around the specified time that contains either the keyword "Quarterly" or "stakeholder meeting". This search produced 383 emails which we need to read through to determine whether they relate to the specific meeting you are referring to and then collate the relevant results accordingly. This, in itself, is a time consuming process but one that we consider manageable within the 18 hour cost limit as previously advised.

However, FOI-2128-1718 requires us to conduct further searches on any emails sent or received by Mike Brown, Helen Chapman or anyone in the Taxi & Private Hire department that relates to Uber’s licence application. It should be noted that our email search facility does not determine searches by department and so we would need to conduct a search of the entire email archive across the full organisation and then manually review the results to determine which of the results were sent to/from individuals employed within the Taxi & Private Hire directorate at the time you have specified. This search would need to be for any emails that reference the word “Uber” to ensure that it covers all possible emails on the subject and then further manual review of the results and subsequent collation would need to be conducted.

Please note that under Regulation 5(2) of the Data Protection and Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004, we are permitted to aggregate requests where they relate to any extent to the same or similar information, and we consider that this is the case with your requests. This aggregation applies to any requests that are received within a sixty working day period.

We have therefore estimated that it would considerably exceed the cost limit to provide a response to your requests. 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. As we are issuing a refusal notice in relation to the aggregated cost limit you may wish to revise your requests and prioritise which information you require within the 18 hour limit, ensuring your request is specific as possible, including keywords to search on where applicable, to allow for a more targeted search.

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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