Copies of invoices for rental accommodation

I can confirm that we hold information relevant to your request but it is subject to a Refusal Notice under section 12(1) of the FOIA.

IPSA is not required to comply with a request for information if it estimates that the cost of compliance would exceed the appropriate limit set by The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 (the Fees Regulations). Under the Fees Regulations, a public authority can only take into account the time it reasonably expects to incur in the tasks set out in regulation 4(3)(a)-(d) (the "Allowable Tasks". For IPSA this is set at 18 hours or £450.

Regulation 4(3) provides that:

'In a case in which this regulation has effect, a public authority may, for the purpose of its estimate, take account only of the costs it reasonably expects to incur in relation to the request in:

(a) determining whether it holds the information,

(b) locating the information, or a document which may contain the information,

(c) retrieving the information, or a document which may contain the information, and

(d) extracting the information from a document containing it.

[....]

An authority can take into account the costs attributable to the time that persons (both the authority’s staff and external contractors) are expected to spend on these activities. Such costs are calculated at £25 per hour per person for all authorities regardless of the actual cost or rate of pay, which means that the limit will be exceeded if these activities exceed... 18 hours for all other authorities.

The four activities are sequential, covering the retrieval process of the information from the public authority’s information store.

In order to estimate the time to process the request we had to research the name and number of MPs who had held seats in Northern Ireland for each year.

IPSA works on a financial year basis, as set out in the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009, which runs from 1 April to 31 March.

We, therefore, researched up to and including the financial year 2021-22. We identified all individual MPs from January 2011 onwards, then had to identify the number of MPs who had made reimbursement claims for rental accommodation – most MPs have their rent paid directly by IPSA to the landlord. In addition, we had to take into account the fact that IPSA had started using a new system in 2019 to process claims; it is easier to locate and extract information from the newer system than the older one.

With the majority of claims falling in the period before 2019, we estimate that it would take in total about 31 hours to process your request.

Advice and Assistance

We have a duty to advise and assist you in refining your request. If you reduced the time period in which you were interested or provided the names of fewer MPs, then we would happily reassess your request.