Invoices submitted by Johnny Mercer for office costs, website hosting and a copy of the constituency office lease

IPSA holds the information that you request.

As you may be aware, we publish details of all claims made by MPs for business costs and expenses on our website. The following details of the claims specified in your request have already been published.

Please click here to download [.zip] copies of the invoices submitted in support of these claims. A small amount of information has been redacted from these invoices. Further information on information which is exempt from disclosure can be found below.

You also requested a copy of the tenancy agreement for Mr Mercer’s constituency office, covering the period from January 2017 to June 2017. Please click here to view a copy of this agreement. As above, we have withheld some personal information from this document, alongside information which, if disclosed, could prejudice the safety of individual(s). Further information can be found below.

Exemptions applied

Section 31 – law enforcement

We have withheld a small amount of information relating to the financial transaction under Section 31(1)(a) (Law enforcement) 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, prejudice the prevention (or detection) or crime. We consider that the withheld information, if disclosed, would be likely to prejudice the financial or data security of the individuals concerned. We do not consider that the public interest in disclosure outweighs this risk. In our opinion the public interest in protecting the security of MPs and their staff outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information.

Section 38 – health and safety

Some information has been withheld from the tenancy agreement 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. 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

Section 40 – personal information

We have also withheld some ‘personal data’ (as defined by the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA)) from the disclosed information. Section 40(2) provides that personal information about third parties is exempt information if disclosure would breach the fair processing principle (Principle 1) of the DPA, where it would be unfair to those persons or is confidential. You can find out more information about personal data and FOI via guidance from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) on their website: http://ico.org.uk.