A town council in Devon has joined the list of those that want to charge for Freedom of Information requests.

The Midweek Herald reports that Honiton Town Council backed a recommendation to introduce a charge for all hard copy requests.

Under current legislation only requests costing more than £450 in staff time to gather the information can be refused.

This is not the first time a council has attempted to introduce charges for FoI requests. In November Pendle Council in Lancashire tried to impose a fee on complex requests.

Local government secretary Eric Pickles has already squashed a previous attempt to enable councils to charge newspapers for FoI requests after the issue was highlighted on HTFP.