Employment details of staff employed by MPs

As you will be aware, IPSA is responsible for paying the salaries of MPs’ staff, the costs of which are paid through each MP’s Staffing Expenditure budget, under the MPs’ Scheme of Business Costs and Expenses (‘the Scheme’).

As such, we hold information on each staff member employed by MPs and paid through IPSA’s payroll, including the staff member’s gender, the gender of the employing MP, the employee’s job title, the weekly hours worked and the employee’s service start date with the employing MP.

Please find attached, at Annex A, the information that you have requested. The information includes all individuals currently employed by MPs, including those on permanent, temporary, fixed-term and casual contracts.

Those on casual contracts submit weekly timesheets, and so we do not hold the same employment details that we do for permanent or fixed term staff. Their salary is therefore indicated as ‘0’ or left blank. For part-time employees, the salary indicated is that actually paid (rather than a full-time equivalent figure).

Individuals who were employed prior to the establishment of IPSA in May 2010 may remain on their previous contracts of employment under the House of Commons arrangements, and their contractual terms may therefore differ from the current conditions set by IPSA. In some instances, pre-IPSA contracts do not specify a working location, and we do not therefore hold this information. Where this is the case, the cell is left blank. All individuals employed since IPSA was established are required to conform with the conditions set by IPSA, including job descriptions and salary ranges. You can find details of these ranges and job responsibilities on our website.

In accordance with section 40 of the FOIA, we have withheld data relating to individuals employed by parties represented by smaller parties and independent MPs: the Speaker, the Green Party, the UK Independence Party, Plaid Cymru, the Ulster Unionist Party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party and Independent MPs. In all of these instances, the nature of the information would make it possible to identify individual MPs, and disclosure of this information would therefore indirectly identify the personal data of individuals employed by these MPs, in contravention of the Data Protection Act.

We have also withheld a small number of job titles, the disclosure of which would – alongside other publicly available information – make it possible to identify individual staff members and their personal data.

Section 40(2) provides that personal information about third parties is exempt information if one of the conditions set out in section 40(3) is satisfied. Under the FOI Act disclosure of this information would breach the fair processing principle (Principle 1) of the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA), where it would be unfair to those persons or is confidential. For further information, you may wish to visit the UK Legislation website.

However, you may be interested in the data we already publish on connected parties, which is available on our website.