Honiton Town Council support recommendation to introduce a charge.
Charges could be introduced by Honiton Town Council to process Freedom of Information Requests.
Councillors, at a meeting of the policy and finance committee last week, backed a recommendation to introduce a charge for all hard copy requests.
Currently, there is a limit in place regarding the cost of providing information -�450 for parish councils.
Any request exceeding this amount can be refused.
Costs are estimated at �25 per hour, taking into account locating and extracting the requested information.
At present, the council does not charge for information under the publication scheme.
Councillor Liz Tirard said: “Charging may stop people making requests on spurious grounds.”
The meeting heard, over the past two years, there had been four cases where requests had taken up a lot of staff time.
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