Fees payable

Details of fees for the provision of information under the Freedom of Information Act are set out in The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 (SI 2004 No. 3244), in force from 1 January 2005. Copies are available from the Stationery Office.

Based on the Regulations and making use of the discretions within it, the FSA has decided to adopt the following fees policy.

Finding costs and charges

We will make no charge for finding the information for requests which cost less than £450.
The right to access information needs to be balanced by our need to carry out our core regulatory duties economically, efficiently and effectively. The Act allows public authorities to decline to comply with certain requests for information where the cost of finding the information would be particularly expensive. We have therefore decided not to answer requests if it would cost more than £450 to do so.

The cost of £450 will be calculated at £25 per person per hour for the time taken to

  • determine whether the information is held,
  • locate and retrieve it, and
  • extract the information from a document (s) containing it.

We will not take into account any time spent

  • deciding whether information should be released; or
  • applying exemptions; or
  • considering the public interest test.

However, where appropriate, we will help you try to refine your request so that it falls within the cost threshold set out above.

Postage and copying

Where the cost of postage, printing or photocopying is below £10 we will not make a charge.

Where it is over £10, the first £10 will be free of charge, thereafter, we will charge the full estimated cost of postage and copying and will tell you how much that will be before we produce the information. If you decide not to pay then we will not release the information.

If you decide that you wish to refine the request so that the cost of, say, copying, is reduced we are happy to discuss that with you.

Aggregating requests

Where two or more requests are received from the same person, or from different persons appearing to us to be acting in concert or as part of a campaign, the cost of complying with any one of them may be taken to be the cost of complying with all of them jointly.

For example if three related requests costing £400 each are received, we can treat them as costing a total of £1,200, and we are entitled to refuse to process the requests. If that appears to be the case, we will explain to you why that is so.