TfL Ref: FOI-3156-1819, FOI-3126-1819, FOI-3257-1819

Thank you for your emails asking for information about Taxi and Private Hire and On-Demand Bus trial.

Your requests have been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. I can confirm we hold some of the information you require.

However, in accordance with 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 of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees Regulations 2004). This is calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described.

Under Regulation 5(2) of the Data Protection and Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004, we are permitted to aggregate requests where they relate to any extent to the same or similar information and this aggregation applies to any requests that are received within a sixty working day period. We have therefore estimated that it would exceed the cost limit to provide a response to the aforementioned three requests.

We have determined that to process request FOI-3257-1819 about the bus trial alone would be very burdensome. There are hundreds of emails that would need to be reviewed. Many of these are likely not to be relevant, duplicates or emails being forwarded internally for discussion during this time period. Locating those that are relevant would require us to manually review all of them, and then extract and compile those that meet your request. Therefore in combination with your other two requests, which also require us to manually review our records to extract any information that is relevant, the time taken to process the requests would considerably exceed the cost limit.

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. As we are issuing a refusal notice in relation to the aggregated cost limit you may wish to revise your requests and priorities which information you require within the 18 hour limit, ensuring your request is as specific as possible.

We also suggest that, before submitting future requests, you consider which information is of the highest priority to ensure that the processing time available is spent on the information that is of most importance to you.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Eva Hextall
FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team
General Counsel
Transport for London