TfL Ref: FOI-4987-1718 and FOI-0165-1819

Thank you for your email received by us on 26 March 2018 asking for the following information:

FOI-4987-1718
All emails and letters for the last four months between Transport for London’s Taxi Private Hire team and its Metropolitan Police Liaison Officer, Jas Sandhu.

FOI-0165-1819
All email correspondence between TPH and XXXXXX@mytaxi in the last 6 months

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. I can confirm that we do hold the information you have requested.

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. This is calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described.

We have determined that there are a significant volume of emails that potentially fit within the scope of the above requests. These emails would each need to be manually reviewed to determine whether they are caught by your requests. Many of the emails are likely to be not relevant, duplicates, due to emails being repeated within email chains, as well as emails being forwarded internally for discussion during this time period. Therefore the actual number of emails covered by your request will be a sub-set of these hits. However, locating those that are relevant would require us to manually review all of them to determine whether the email, or email chain, is relevant to your request and then we would need to extract and compile all of those that meet your request.

It should also be noted that our email search facility does not determine searches by department and so we can not run a remote search on “TPH” but would need to conduct a search of the entire email archive across the full organisation and then manually review the results to determine which of the results were sent to/from individuals employed within the Taxi & Private Hire directorate at the time you have specified.

As we have explained to you in the past, under Regulation 5(2) of the Regulations, 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, including requests from individuals considered to be acting in concert. We consider that this applies to the two requests identified above.

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.

We have also previously provided you with guidance on making the best use of FOI, but will reiterate that advice. Before submitting future requests you should consider which information is of the highest priority to make best use of the processing time within the FOI Act described above. Similarly, please be aware that requests that are to any extent similar (either from the same person or those that we have identified as being made in concert) will be considered together for the purposes of calculating the cost limit. Therefore, we recommend submitting single, complete and focussed requests for information based around the information that is of the most importance to you.

Furthermore, as also explained to you in the past, 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 requests covering a large number of emails is significant and this should be borne in mind before submitting further requests. We therefore strongly recommend you outline, as clearly and concisely as possible, precisely the information and types of document you require. Requests that lack a clear focus are more likely to lead to concerns about the processing time required to meet our obligations under the FOI Act.

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

Yours sincerely

Lee Hill
Information Access Manager
FOI Case Management Team
General Counsel
Transport for London