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.
We will have to help to protect each of our internet based freedoms or we will lose them.
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