Landlords and postcodes for office and residential accommodation rented by MPs
Request
Under a freedom of information request could I ask at the current time the designation of the main home of all MP’s is either in the constituency or outside of the constituency?
Response
IPSA holds the information that you have requested.
Under the provisions of the MPs’ Scheme of Business Costs and Expenses (‘the Scheme’), non-London MPs may claim for accommodation expenditure to meet costs necessarily incurred on overnight accommodation which is required for the performance of their parliamentary functions. This may be in relation to a property at one location, either in the London area or within their constituency (or within 20 miles of any point in the constituency). You can view the Scheme in full on our website here.
Further, Office Costs Expenditure (OCE) is provided to meet the costs of running, equipping and maintaining an office (or offices). This includes the renting of one or more premises to be used as a constituency office, each of which must be registered with IPSA before a rental claim is made.
At the end of each financial year, we publish information on properties rented by MPs under the Scheme (residential and office), which includes:
the landlord of the property, and
the first part of the postcode for the property rented.
Due to an upload error, the information for the 2015-16 financial year is not yet available on our website. We are currently working to correct this fault.
As such, please click here to download the data for the 2015-16 financial year (opens in spreadsheet format).
We have withheld a small amount of information under section 38(1)(b) (Health and safety) of the FOI Act. This section of the Act states that information is exempt if its disclosure under the FOI Act would, or would be likely to, endanger the safety of any individual.
After considering the nature of the withheld information it is our opinion that were a disclosure to be made into the public domain it is likely that this information could be used to endanger the safety of the individuals who rely upon these locations for accommodation. Although we recognise the public interest in transparency surrounding the publishing of this information there is also a strong public interest in ensuring that as an organisation we are able to protect our service users from threats to their safety. In our opinion the public interest in protecting the personal safety of MPs outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information.
Data relating to the 2016-17 financial year will be published following the end of the financial year.
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- Ref:
- CAS-69471
- Disclosure:
- 3 February 2017
- Categories:
- MPs' ACCOMMODATIONMPs' OFFICE COSTS
- Exemptions Applied:
- Section 38