Private Hire Drivers - English Language Requirement (ELR) and the Safety and Equality Regulatory Understanding (SERU) Assessment
Request ID: FOI-3692-2324 Date published: 13 February 2024
You asked
Can you please supply all communication between any of the following: the Mayor of London, the Mayor’s office or other GLA staff, the Deputy Mayor for Transport and Transport for London staff, referencing the English Language Requirement (ELR) and the Safety and Equality Regulatory Understanding (SERU) Assessment for Private Hire Drivers between 1st September 2023 and 18th January 2024.
We answered
Our Ref: FOI-3692-2324
Thank you for your request received on 18 January 2024 asking for correspondence regarding private hire vehicle (PHV) drivers assessments.
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) 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 FOI (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 cost over £450 to provide a response to your current request. This is because it is estimated that it would take in excess of 18 working hours to retrieve and compile the information you have requested.
When requests for email correspondence are received the FOI Case Management team are able to conduct a company-wide email searches using keywords, dates and email addresses. The more specific a requester can be as to what they are looking for, the more we can narrow the search and therefore stand a better chance of a more relevant or focused result. A search will then return an amount of ‘hits’ which potentially contain information relating to the search terms used. Each ‘hit’ is a single email, although that email will often consist of a chain of emails containing the search term at least once.
We have done an initial search for all emails held by TfL sent/received by TfL email accounts to accounts with a @london.gov.uk suffix using the parameters set out in your request. This has returned over 1900 hits. A brief review of the results indicates that this correspondence varies in context considerably and cover a wide variety of information. Please note that this number will also include duplicates, as well as emails sent from third parties which TfL were copied into so are not caught by the request. However, we would still need to manually review all of the emails identified by the search in order to extract and collate the relevant emails.
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. For example, if there is a specific element of the driver policy that you are interested in then this may narrow any search we would have to do. You might also consider limiting your request to a particular period of time. By their nature, emails contain a significant amount of personal data such as phone numbers and email addresses and so, whilst this process of redaction does not feature as part of our considerations on whether the cost limit might apply, the burden created by non-specific requests for emails is significant and this should be borne in mind before submitting requests of this nature. It is likely that we would be able to provide information on specific questions that you have rather than correspondence on a wider topic. If you want to refine your request or make a FOI Act request in future, please bear in mind that the FOI 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, specifying the types of document that you are looking for. Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, we do 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. Please note that we will not be taking further action until we receive your revised request. In the meantime, if you have any queries or would like to discuss your request, please do not hesitate to contact me. Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Gemma Jacob Senior FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
