Musculoskeletal Condition/s under the DVLA Group 2

d.little made this Freedom of Information request to Transport for London Automatic anti-spam measures are in place for this older request. Please let us know if a further response is expected or if you are having trouble responding.

The request was refused by Transport for London.

Dear Transport for London,

Can you supply a copy of the section for Musculoskeletal Condition/s under the DVLA Group 2 Driving Licence standard where a Taxi Driver Licence or Private Hire Driver Licence would be suspended / revoked.

Could you confirm how many licensees have been suspended/revoked due to the above condition or threatened with suspension or revoking of their licence in the last three years.

Could you kindly explain how TFL fulfill their duty under The Equality Act 2010 Disability Discrimination in the above circumstances.

Yours faithfully,

D. Little

FOI, Transport for London

Dear Mr Little

TfL Ref: 3559-2324

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on6 January 2024 asking for information about Musculoskeletal Condition/s under the DVLA Group 2.

Your request will be processed in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy.

A response will be sent to you by 2 February 2024. We publish a substantial range of information on our website on subjects including operational performance, contracts, expenditure, journey data, governance and our financial performance. This includes data which is frequently asked for in FOI requests or other public queries. Please check http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transpar... to see if this helps you.

We will publish anonymised versions of requests and responses on the www.tfl.gov.uk website. We will not publish your name and we will send a copy of the response to you before it is published on our website.

In the meantime, if you would like to discuss this matter further, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours sincerely

Sara Thomas
FOI Case Management Team
General Counsel
Transport for London

show quoted sections

FOI, Transport for London

1 Attachment

Dear Mr Little

 

TfL Ref: 3559-2324

 

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on6
January 2024 asking for information about Musculoskeletal Condition/s
under the DVLA Group 2.

 

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of
the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. 

Specifically you asked:

 

Can you supply a copy of the section for Musculoskeletal Condition/s under
the DVLA Group 2 Driving Licence standard where a Taxi Driver Licence or
Private Hire Driver Licence would be suspended / revoked.

 

Could you confirm how many licensees have been suspended/revoked due to
the above condition or threatened with suspension or revoking of their
licence in the last three years.

 

Could you kindly explain how TFL fulfil their duty under The Equality Act
2010 Disability Discrimination in the above circumstances.

I can confirm that we hold the information you require.

 

Further to our response to FOI ref 2613-2324, the DVLA Group 2 guidelines
are publicly available (from the Government) here: 
[1]https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk...

 

In accordance with section 21 of the FOI Act, we are not obliged to supply
you with a copy of the requested information as it is already accessible
to you elsewhere.

With regard to the second part of your request asking about the number of
revocations or suspensions for the specific condition you refer to in the
last three years, we do not record this information in a reportable
format. In order for us to provide the information you have requested, we
would need to manually review hundreds of individual licensing records to
identify those you have asked about and then collate them. It is expected
that it would take 12-15 minutes to look at each licensing record. Your
request is therefore being refused under section 12 of the Freedom of
Information Act. Under section 12, TfL is not obliged to provide
information if it would cost more than £450 to determine if the requested
information is held, and to then locate, retrieve or extract it from
elsewhere. This is calculated at a rate of £25 per hour, equivalent to 18
hours work.

 

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, please be aware that, under the FOI Act,
we do not have to answer a request 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 the request. On this
basis, the last part of your request does not fall under the FOI Act 2000.
We understand however that you are in contact with our taxi and private
hire licensing team on this issue.

 

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to
appeal as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would
like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.

Yours sincerely,

Sara Thomas
FOI Case Officer
FOI Case Management Team
General Counsel
Transport for London

 

 

 

show quoted sections

Dear FOI,
Thank you for the information, however, their is no section listed for Musculoskeletal Condition/s under
the DVLA Group 2 Driving Licence standard. If I am wrong could you supply the page number.

The former General Manager Mr John Mason was bought into the department to computerise all Drivers records. This information should be stored on the computers.

Yours sincerely,

d.little

FOI, Transport for London

TfL Ref: IRV-203-2324

Thank you for your email which was received by Transport for London (TfL) on 31 January 2024

You have expressed that you are dissatisfied with the handling of part your request for information under the Freedom of Information Act.

A review will be conducted by an internal review panel in accordance with TfL’s Internal Review Procedure, which is available via the following URL:
https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transparenc...

Every effort will be made to provide you with a response by 27 February 2024. However, if the review will not be completed by this date, we will contact you and notify you of the revised response date as soon as possible.

In the meantime, if you would like to discuss this matter further please contact me.

Emma Flint
Principal Information Access Adviser
FOI Case Management Team
Transport for London

show quoted sections

FOI, Transport for London

Dear David Little

 

I am contacting you with regards to your email of 31 January 2023.
Following your email a review has been carried out in relation to
FOI-3559-2324 by individuals who were not involved in the handling of your
request (the panel).

 

To confirm your request was as follows - Can you supply a copy of the
section for Musculoskeletal Condition/s under the DVLA Group 2 Driving
Licence standard where a Taxi Driver Licence or Private Hire Driver
Licence would be suspended / revoked.

 

Could you confirm how many licensees have been suspended/revoked due to
the above condition or threatened with suspension or revoking of their
licence in the last three years.

 

Could you kindly explain how TFL fulfill their duty under The Equality Act
2010 Disability Discrimination in the above circumstances.

 

Following the response to FOI-3559-2324 your subsequent email of 31
January stated - Thank you for the information, however, their is no
section listed for Musculoskeletal Condition/s under the DVLA Group 2
Driving Licence standard. If I am wrong could you supply the page number.
The former General Manager Mr John Mason was bought into the department to
computerise all Drivers records. This information should be stored on the
computers.

 

The panel have liaised with the appropriate subject matter experts within
Taxi and Private Hire and can confirm that the DVLA Group 2 guidelines
which are published by the DfT is all the recorded information that we
hold within the scope of what you seek under FOI. Any further granular
detail specifically concerning your case should be done so directly with
the appropriate individuals in Taxi and Private Hire.

 

With regards to your request for “how many licensees have been
suspended/revoked due to the above condition or threatened with suspension
or revoking of their licence in the last three years” to provide you with
a little more context with regards to your request for information,
section 12 of FOIA allows a public authority to refuse to deal with a
request where it estimates that it would exceed the appropriate limit to-

 

(a) either comply with the request in its entirety or;

(b) confirm or deny whether the requested information is held.

 

The estimate must be reasonable in the circumstances of the case and where
we claim that section 12 is engaged, we should, where reasonable, provide
advice and assistance to help the requestor to refine the request so that
it can be dealt with under the appropriate limit. The relevant Regulations
which define the appropriate limit for section 12 purposes are The Freedom
of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees)
Regulation.

 

Regulation 4(3) of the Fees Regulations states that a public authority can
only take into account the costs it reasonably expects to incur in
carrying out the following permitted activities in complying with the
request:

 

• determining whether the information is held;

• locating the information, or a document containing it;

• retrieving the information, or a document containing it; and

• extracting the information from a document containing it.

 

Additionally in such circumstances as may be prescribed, where two or more
requests for information are made to a public authority within a
consecutive 60 working day period-

 

(a) by one person, or

(b) by different persons who appear to the public authority to be acting
in concert or in pursuance of a campaign,

 

the estimated cost of complying with any of the requests is to be taken to
be the estimated total cost of complying with all of them. We do not have
to make a precise calculation of the costs of complying with a request(s);
instead only an realistic estimate is required.

 

A realistic estimate is one based on the time it would take to obtain the
requested information from the relevant records or files as they existed
at the time of the request, or up to the date for statutory compliance
with the request. We are not obliged to search for, or compile some of the
requested information before refusing a request that we estimate will
exceed the appropriate limit. Instead, we can rely on having cogent
arguments and/or evidence in support of the reasonableness of its
estimate. However, it is likely that we will sometimes carry out some
initial searches before deciding to claim section 12. This is because it
may only become apparent that section 12 is engaged once some work in
attempting to comply with the request has been undertaken. If we do start
to carry out some searches without an initial estimate, we can stop
searching as soon as we realise that it would exceed the appropriate limit
to fully comply with a request and we are not obliged to search up to the
appropriate limit.

 

In this instance as advised this information covering a 3 year period is
not held in a central repository that we can easily run a report on to
identify the data you seek. All licensed drivers are required to provide
medical information, and both private hire vehicle drivers (PHV) and taxi
drivers are required to have the same medical fitness.

 

Therefore this information, whist it is stored electronically, forms part
of every individual driver file / record. This covers 17,531 Taxi Drivers
and 106,846 PHV drivers.

 

Each driver file would require staff to manually review it to locate and
identify the information prior to extraction. These documents are often
generic (i.e. is a singular driver email or one document attached to
another etc) and there is no uniformity between how the information is
stored on the files to assist the review. This can be further compounded
if these driver have been relicensed a number of times. Therefore each
electronic file would require a thorough manual review. As some files will
naturally be much larger than others, if we take a very conservative
average of 5 minutes per driver file this would equate to in excess of
10,000 hours of staff time and resources to complete.

 

We have no other mechanism available other than a manual search to address
your request.

 

Clearly the manual review of over 124,000 driver records would be an
exorbitant task to undertake therefore taking into account all the
considerations above, the panel agree that to try and respond to your
request in its entirety would unjustifiably and disproportionately divert
a vast amount of staff time and resource away from their core functions,
the panel are satisfied that s12 has been correctly applied to your
request.

 

Finally s12 of the Freedom of Information Act is not a qualified exemption
therefore it does not require consideration of the public interest test.

 

We appreciate that the above response may come as a disappointment
therefore when considering this review response and the all explanations
provided to you the panel suggest that if you wish to make a new FOI
request you greatly narrow the scope of the data you seek. It is a far
better use of the resources available to you under the FOI Act to be as
narrow and specific as you are able to allow a focused search for the
information you are interested in and allow us to assist you.

 

We encourage requesters to take into account the guidance and advice
provided by the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) such as the “dos
and don’ts” published on its website in order to make the best use of the
processing time available under the FOI Act. The following link to the ICO
website provides advice on how to make an FOI request -
[1]https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/off...

 

I hope the above response has provided a better clarity regarding the
information you seek, however if you are dissatisfied with the internal
review actions to date please do not hesitate to contact me or alternately
you can refer the matter to the independent authority responsible for
enforcing the Freedom of Information Act, at the following address:

 

Information Commissioner’s Office

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire SK9 5AF

 

A complaint form is also available on the ICO’s website
([2]www.ico.org.uk).

 

Yours sincerely

 

Emma Flint

Principal Information Access Adviser

FOI Case Management Team

Transport for London

[3][TfL request email]

 

 

 

This message has been scanned for malware by Forcepoint. [4]www.forcepoint.com

References

Visible links
1. https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/off...
2. http://www.ico.org.uk/
3. mailto:[TfL request email]
4. http://www.forcepoint.com/