Receipts for six Scottish MPs since 2009

Request

  1. Can I please have a copy of any original expense receipts or invoices submitted by the following current and former MPs between 2009 and today’s date: Alex Salmond, Angus Robertson, Michael Weir, Eilidh Whiteford, Pete Wishart, Menzies Campbell.

  2. Can I please have a copy of any original expense receipts or invoices submitted by the following current and former MPs between 2009 and today’s date: Gordon Brown, Danny Alexander, Alistair Carmichael, Ian Murray, Alistair Darling, Douglas Alexander, Angus MacNeil, David Mundell, Eric Joyce.


Response

IPSA holds the information that you request.

We hold supporting documentation for all claims for business costs and expenses submitted by MPs since we were established in May 2010. Each piece of supporting documentation is held on our online system alongside the information entered manually by the MP (which is separately published on our website).

Each piece of supporting documentation must be located and extracted from the individual claim line in which they are held, which can take a significant amount of time when dealing with tens of thousands of individual claims. As such, we have carried out a test in order to estimate the time it would take to determine, locate, retrieve and extract the information you have requested in your requests of 20 May.

Under the terms of the FOIA, public authorities are not obliged to respond to requests where compliance would exceed the appropriate cost limit of £450 (part 1 of Schedule 1 of the Freedom of Information Act). Regulation 5 of the Fees Regulations[1] specifies that when a public authority is estimating whether the appropriate limit is likely to be exceeded, it can include the costs of complying with two or more requests, where they are:

  • made by one person, or by different persons who appear to the public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign;

  • made for the same or similar information; and

  • received by the public authority within any period of 60 consecutive working days.

You submitted two requests on 20 May 2015. As such and pursuant to Regulation 5, we have aggregated the time that would be taken to deal with those requests for the purposes of determining whether the prescribed limit of 18 hours would be exceeded. We have estimated that extracting the information you have requested, as per the procedure described above, would considerably exceed the appropriate cost limit. Consequently, IPSA is not obliged to respond to these requests.

[1] Further information on the Fees Regulations can be found at the following address: https://www.justice.gov.uk/information-access-rights/foi-guidance-for-practitioners/fees

Ref:
CAS-16686
Disclosure:
11 June 2015
Categories:
COPIES OF RECEIPTS/INVOICES
Exemptions Applied:
Cost limit