Petition Freedom of Information Requests made by the media should not be free and paid for by the Media Organisation.

When a Commercial media organisation (Newspapers etc) make a FOI Request solely for the use of commercial gain, in the production of news stories, they should pay all costs incurred by meeting an FOI request, also habitual individuals, one individual for example, claims on his website to have made 185 in the last year on the figures shown below thats £54,205 & 1387 hours work, (based on the average cost)
Central government received 27,294 requests during 2010. If every request costs an average of £293 and takes 7.5 hours to process - figures calculated by a research company - the total spend across central government would total £7.9m, and take an estimated 200,000 hours.
It is this money - and time - that could be put to better use, claim many in the public sector, especially when frontline services are being cut back while jobs are being lost.