Amounts paid to Lee Communications & Public Affairs

Request

I wish to request, under the Freedom of Information Act, that you:

  • Tell me how much has been paid to Lee Communications & Public Affairs limited by IPSA in each full financial year for which data is available, with invoices and receipts.

  • Tell me under which category claims involving Lee Communications & Public Affairs limited have been made and which MP submitted the claim.

Response

IPSA holds the information that you request.

In order to retrieve the information you have requested, we would need to carry out a manual search of every invoice and receipt held by IPSA, to identify those where payments have been made to Lee Communications & Public Affairs.

In processing your request, we undertook a test to estimate the amount of time it would take to locate, retrieve and extract this information from the invoices and receipts we hold.  We estimate that it would take 100 hours of staff time which, taken with our estimate to determine whether the information is held for the first part of your request, takes us considerably over the appropriate cost limit of £450 (part 1 of Schedule 1 of the Freedom of Information Act).  Consequently, IPSA is not obliged to respond to your request (see section 12(1), FOIA).

You may be interested in refining your request for information in order to obtain some of the information you require within the statutory cost limit.  Reducing the time period requested, or limiting your request to a specific MP, would substantially reduce the time required to locate, retrieve and extract the information you require.

Ref:
F1314-132
Disclosure:
23 October 2013
Categories:
MPs' STAFFING
Exemptions Applied:
Cost limit