TfL Ref: FOI-2142-1617

Thank you for your email received by Transport for London (TfL) on 3 February 2017 asking for details on journeys claimed by senior staff on expenses.

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.

We have estimated that it would considerably exceed the appropriate limit to provide a response to this request. There is not a separate and distinct definition of “Head of Department” (such as a grade) that would enable a report to be run to identify these employees. Therefore we would need to manually search through the organisation charts of all business areas within the organisation to determine any employees who might meet this position and then search the expenses list to see whether their name features at any point in the last two years. In addition to this, once a claim under the category of “Taxi” has been identified, the only way to obtain the information you require would be to manually search through the receipts of these journeys to determine those which were made with Uber and collate them accordingly. Receipts for journeys made prior to June 2016 are held in archive so these would need to be retrieved before they can be reviewed which would further increase the processing time of 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. 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. We estimate that it will be possible to process your request within the cost limit if you were to narrow your timeframe to ‘since June 2016’ and specify only those employees graded Director and/or Managing Director.

Please note that we will not be taking further action until we receive your revised request.

In the meantime, if you have any queries or would like to discuss your request, please do not hesitate to contact me.

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