Are Councils Allowed to Charge?
Councils can charge a fee for the provision of information requested under the EIRs to cover the costs of finding, preparing, and sending the information, such as staff time, printing, or postage. The fee must be reasonable and not designed to make a profit. For example searching for specific records, copying large volumes of documents and sending information by post.
When will a Charge be Applied
The council must be transparent, explain our charges and how they are calculated so requesters know the cost upfront. The charges must be reasonable and reflect actual costs. We cannot charge for the time spent deciding whether to provide the information.
Some environmental information will remain free to access such as:
- information contained in the public registers we hold
- lists of information
- published data sets
- information published in our disclosure log
- examining information at the council’s office
Requests relating to the following will incur a charge:
- elements of CON29 information
- Contaminated land
- email trails informing decisions or results
- background documents
- third party exchanges
- information where we are entitled to levy market based charge
- any request where compliance is expected to exceed 1 hour to locate, extract, and collate the information requested.
Where a charge is applicable, we will inform the requester as soon as possible. We will send a fees quote to the requester which will include:
- How much the charge will be?
- How we estimated the charge.
- The deadline for making the payment (normally 60 days from the date of the fees notice)
In all cases where a charge is payable, payment will be required in advance of any work to assemble and supply the information.
The standard charges that have been set are as follows:
- £30 per hour for staff time
- £30 per property for CON29 queries
- £144 per contaminated land request for the 1st hour, £104.40 per additional hour
- 0.35 per A4 black and white print out or photocopy
- 0.78p per A4 colour print out or photocopy
- £0.64 per A3 black and white print out or photocopy
- £1.49 per A3 colour print out or photocopy
- Further costs may apply for disbursements such as (redaction tape, envelopes etc.) and these will be advised if applicable.
All charges include VAT
Details of our charges can be found on the Councils transparency webpages, in the Fees and Charges Booklet on the Finances of the Council page.