The Charity Commission received so much correspondence regarding its decision to register the LGB Alliance as a charity it is unable to say how much support or opposition the decision has.
The regulator announced that the controversial campaign group had been registered as a charity on 21 April.
A Freedom of Information request made by Third Sector on 27 April asked how many complaints the regulator had received, following numerous reports on social media of users who were unhappy with the decision.
In less than a week the regulator received more than 500 items of correspondence relating to its decision to register the charity.
In its response to the FOI request, the regulator said: “As you will appreciate, the commission has received a large amount of correspondence regarding the charity, over 500 items from date of registration to date of your request, that could either be in support of the registration or a complaint regarding the registration or other.
“There is no marker to identify which of these items contains a complaint.
“As such to examine each piece of correspondence to identify if it contained a complaint we estimate would take in excess of 24 hours to comply with your request and therefore your request will not be processed further.”
Under FOI legislation a public body does not have to comply with a request if it is likely to exceed a cost of £600, which represents the estimated cost of one person spending 24 hours or 3.5 working days on gathering the information.
The regulator initially received more than 100 formal objections to the registration of the LGB Alliance, and an online petition calling on it to reject the application has received more than 44,000 signatures.
On Tuesday several LGBT charities announced that they had joined forces to appeal the commission’s decision to award charity status to the LGB Alliance.
The crowdfunder has so far raised over £46,000 from more than 1,800 pledges.