TfL Ref: 2835/2837-1920

Thank you for your requests received by us on 19 December 2019 asking for information about complaints concerning black cabs.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. You asked for:

the number of complaints made concerning black cabs since August 2017

Please see the following table for the requested information:
Month and Year Black Cab
2017 2730
August 519
September 531
October 686
November 539
December 455
2018 5431
January 441
February 391
March 462
April 382
May 434
June 485
July 588
August 357
September 451
October 474
November 473
December 493
2019 5573
January 444
February 473
March 555
April 555
May 500
June 610
July 613
August 477
September 478
October 453
November 415
Total 13734

What ratio of complaints made to the Public Carriage Office since August 2017 concerning black cabs have been found in favor of the passenger.

I can confirm that we do hold the information you require. However, as mentioned in our previous response to you (reference 2721-1920), to provide the information you have requested would still 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 requests 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. In this instance, we estimate that the time required to answer your request would exceed 18 hours which, at £25 per hour (the rate stipulated by the Regulations), exceeds the ‘appropriate limit’.
This is because our complaints database does not record the information you are seeking in the format requested. Therefore the only way to answer the second part of your request would be to manually read each individual complaint, which would then need to be extracted and collated accordingly, thereby easily exceeding the cost limit.
To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider refining your request to a narrow period of time for example.
Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, TfL does not have to answer your question if it would require the creation of new information or the provision of a judgement, explanation, advice or opinion that was not already recorded at the time of your request. If you have specific questions relating to these topics we may be more easily able to respond to these than to a request for any information
If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for any reason, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.
Yours sincerely
Jasmine Howard
FOI Case Officer
Information Governance
Transport For London