Proportion of Uber drivers that appear on another taxi service providers driver/vehicle lists
Request ID: FOI-2923-2122 Date published: 19 April 2022
You asked
We understand that, on a weekly basis, operators of taxi services in the London area must submit information to TFL. This information is submitted as two lists, the ‘Driver List’ and the ‘Vehicle List’. Our understanding is that these lists are submitted as two .csv files, each containing three fields.
The driver list contains:
• PHV Driver License Number
• First Name of driver
• Surname of driver
The vehicle list contains:
• Vehicle Registration Mark
• Vehicle Make
• Vehicle License Number
Please provide us with the following information with respect to the lists provided by all taxi operators for each weekly submission between 3 January 2021 and 4 April 2021; between 5 April and 4 July 2021; between 5 July and 3 October 2021; and between 4 October 2021 and 2 January 2022 – with the latter period of highest priority.
1. What percentage of PHV driver license numbers submitted by Uber were submitted by another providers of taxi services in the same week?
2. What percentage of Vehicle Registration Marks submitted by Uber were submitted by another providers of taxi services in the same week?
3. What percentage of Vehicle License Numbers submitted by Uber were submitted by another providers of taxi services in the same week?
Please note that for each of these three items we are interested to know if the identifier appeared in the lists of any these other provider of taxi services. Therefore, if e.g., a PHV driver license number appeared in two other taxi providers’ lists, this should be counted only once.
Please note that, if the cost of providing this information exceeds £450, we are willing to pay for the information.
Please provide the information in the form of a .xlsx file where, for example:
• Column A gives the date of the Monday of the week in which the information was submitted to TFL
• Column B gives the proportions expressed as a percentage in answer to Question 1 above with each row giving the proportion for the submission week reported in Column A
• Column C gives the proportions expressed as a percentage in answer to Question 2 above with each row giving the proportion for the submission week reported in Column A
• Column D gives the proportions expressed as a percentage in answer to Question 3 above with each row giving the proportion for the submission week reported in Column A
We answered
Our ref: FOI-2923-2122/GH
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 21 March 2022 asking for information about Private Hire driver/vehicle lists.
Your request has been considered under the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and our information access policy.
I can confirm that we do hold the information you require. 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 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’.
To provide the information you have requested we would have to cross reference the driver and vehicle records received from Uber with the information provided by other Private Hire operators. It is not possible to run a report to provide this information, and therefore this would involve the manual manipulation of very large datasets as we have received huge amounts of information from each operator that was licensed during this period. This work would easily exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ and would divert a disproportionate amount of our staff resources from carrying out their day to day activities.
To help bring the cost of responding to your requests within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider refining your requests to concentrate on matters which are important to you.
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 held.
If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Graham Hurt FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
