TfL Ref: FOI-2305-1617

Thank you for your email received by us on 21 February 2017 asking for information about Uber.

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. Please note that, while on this occasion we have formally processed your request, any future requests that use derogatory terms will not be considered until suitable wording is used to enable us to determine the information being requested.

However, 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 search the mailboxes of every TfL employee in the last six months for anything sent or received involving an email account associated with Uber. Such a broad search would require us to then manually read through several thousand emails to determine which would fall within the scope of your request and manually collate accordingly. Such a task would clearly be very burdensome and far in excess of the cost limit applicable to your request as a whole.

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.

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