The Scunthorpe Telegraph has revealed the age of the youngest person in North Lincolnshire to be arrested for a suspected drugs offence – and the youngest to be caught driving a stolen car, and how much money the council spends on taxis, following a wave of successful Freedom of Information requests.

Reporters at the paper are regularly encouraged to come up with ideas for requests for information under the FOI Act, and the festive period brought a flurry of stories.

They included a front page story revealing that a 12-year-old had become the youngest person in North Lincolnshire to be arrested for driving a stolen car.

Another page lead reported that a 13-year-old boy had been arrested for possession of class B amphetamines – the youngest person in the past year.

The Telegraph also reported that Humberside Police had issued 27 shotgun licences to under-16s in the past year, and that North Lincolnshire Council had spent £1.25m on taxis in the past three financial years.

News editor Vicky Cottam said the FOI Act was proving a useful tool, and that the majority of requests issued by reporters had be answered quickly by the relevant authorities.

She said: “Every now and again we ask reporters to come up with two or three ideas and after we’ve talked them through they submit them.

“During the year, and during the Christmas period, it has provided us with a source of interesting and unusual stories.

“Only a handful have come back with an authority saying that they can’t supply the information we asked for for whatever reason or that they would struggle in the time allowed.”

The Telegraph also reported that more than £8,000 of damage had been done to the region’s libraries by vandals in the past two years, and that almost 1,000 black bin bags had been dumped in North Lincolnshire in the first five months of 2006.