£100 fee blunder over Freedom of Information papers

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An undetected computer error has meant some customers are facing fees of more than £100 for papers that should have been available for a nominal charge.

The archive, based at Kew in South-West London, releases huge numbers of previously secret or private Government reports for study by academics and the public.

Last week it made available documents that showed Winston Churchill's alarm about an influx of 'coloured people' in Fifties Britain.

But yesterday, the archives' online centre was closed for 'essential maintenance' after The Mail on Sunday alerted it to the overcharging.

A list of National Archive material is published online, where internet users pay a fixed fee of £3.50 to download batches of documents. Scanned copies of archived papers can also be ordered online at £8.50 for ten.

Last week, however, it cost £84 to download documents on the famous obscenity court case over D.H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover.

And a security service file on Communist sympathiser Clemens Dutt - 40 scanned images - carried a £140 charge rather than the £34 it should have cost.

The National Archive has admitted "an encoding error" had caused the problem - believed to date back two months - and said anyone found to have been overcharged would be refunded.

A spokesman insisted that only a few people had been affected.