Amount spent by TfL on Uber private hire journeys
Request ID: FOI-2468-1718
Date published: 18 December 2017
You asked
Please state the amount spent by TfL on Uber private hire journeys in each of the following financial years.
a) 2012-13
b) 2013-14
c) 2014-15
d) 2015-16
e) 2016-17
f) 2017-18 to 28.11.17
We answered
TfL Ref: FOI-2468-1718
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 28 November 2017 asking for information about expenditure.
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. To be able to answer this, we would first need to locate all of the expenses under the category of “Taxi”. Then, the only way to obtain the information you require would be to manually search through the receipts of these journeys to determine those which are covered by your request and collate them accordingly. This is because the way these claims are recorded does not differentiate between Taxi or Private Hire journeys, or even journeys that take place in London or elsewhere, and so only the receipt would be able to provide this detail. Such a task would take a considerable amount of time and vastly exceed the cost limit. Furthermore, the majority of receipts for claims made within the scope of your request 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. We have recently provided this information in response to another FOI request across a six month period (1 October 2016 and 31 March 2017) which we determined to be the maximum time period we could process within the cost limit. If you would like to request this information we would, of course, be able to provide you with the relevant figures.
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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