Freedom of Information request - TFL Private Hire Licence Revocations by dismissals from Uber
Request ID: FOI-4356-2324 Date published: 18 March 2024
You asked
Dear Transport for London,
I kindly request you provide the data from the TFL database, on how many Private Hire Driver Licences have been revoked based on dismissal from the Uber platform. Uber London used to take PHV drivers on board and used to pay them referrals but since the decision of the Supreme Court, entitling the PHV drivers working for Uber their holiday pay, Uber London started to dismiss drivers for petty reasons. As they have to report the driver to TFL about their dismissals, TFL has revoked the licences of many drivers due to the dismissal notification of Uber.
I specifically require the data from 2018 onward as the Supreme Court decision was somewhere in 2020.
I look forward to hearing from you soon and thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation.
Yours faithfully,
We answered
TfL Ref: FOI-4356-2324
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on22 February 2024 asking for information about Private Hire Licence revocations.
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 that we 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 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. We consider that it would take in excess of 18 hours to locate the information you have requested which, calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described, exceeds the ‘appropriate limit’. When a driver’s licence is revoked we do not report on where the revocation originated from. We report on the reason for a licence revocation by the type of offence that has occurred. There have been over 3000 revocations that have taken place over the last 6 years. A significant amount of resources and time would be required to locate and manually review each individual record to determine which licence revocations originated from a notification from the private hire operator, and then extract and collate any relevant information we may hold to answer this request.
To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to narrow its scope to focus on matters that are of most importance to you so that we can more easily locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely,
Mary Abidakun FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
