Information's not free

This story's been in the offing for some time and is likely to go on for some time longer. The Department for Constitutional Affairs reckons it's too expensive to process Freedom of Information request, so is now going to refuse any request that would take more than 2.5 hours to process.

What's a little rich however is that the DCA reckons it costs £254 an hour for someone to consider a request, which tells me that the government has very poor information handling processes and very well paid staff. Of course, when this figure was questioned by a campaign group, the government refused to reveal how it calculated this amount.

If the cost of a particular request is so significant high, why doesn't the government charge the person requesting a fee? Or better still, why doesn't it just accept that this is a cost of government which we should be - or are already - paying for in taxes?