Breakdown of salaries paid to MPs' staff

Request

I would like to put in an FOI request for the following information please for gender and pay for Member's staff. I'm looking for an update on this FOI: 2015-16/cas-26942/

Could I have the most recent year date available please? As per the previous FOI, could you also split this down by:

The political party of the MP; The gender of the MP (and the political party of the MP); Employee job title (and the political party of the MP); Weekly hours worked, or an indication of whether the employee is part-time or full-time (and the political party of the MP); The ethnic origin of the employee (and the political party of the MP); Whether the employee self-identifies as disabled (and the political party of the MP); The length of service the employee has worked (and the political party of the MP) Whether the member of staff is a 'connected' employee or not - in relation to the MP


Response

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 Scheme of MPs’ 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.

We do not hold information on the ethnic origin of the employee or whether employees identify as disabled, and so are unable to provide this information.

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 a salary. 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 with the House of Commons, and their contractual terms may therefore differ from IPSA’s current guidelines. In some instances, House of Commons 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 to IPSA’s guidelines.

For reference, most job titles are categorised into the following job ‘families’. Where we have not been able to provide specific job titles for data protection reasons, we have tried to indicate the job family instead.

AdministrativeExecutiveResearch
1SecretaryCaseworker
Personal AssistantCommunications Officer
Executive OfficerConstituency Assistant
Administrative OfficerSupport Officer
Constituency Support Officer
2Senior SecretarySenior CaseworkerParliamentary Assistant
Senior Executive OfficerConstituency Communications ManagerResearcher
Senior Administrative OfficerConstituency Support ManagerResearch Officer
Administrative ManagerSenior Communications Officer
3Principal SecretarySenior Parliamentary Assistant
Office ManagerSenior Researcher
Executive Office ManagerResearch Manager
Chief of staff

Information withheld from disclosure

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, Plaid Cymru and any 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 any information (primarily job titles) which, when used in combination with other information contained within the data, may make it possible to identify individual staff members (and thus their personal data).

We are also unable to provide information on whether or not the employee in question is a connected party. As noted above, disclosure of this information would, when used in combination with other information contained within the data, 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 publication website.

Ref:
CAS-99866
Disclosure:
8 January 2018
Categories:
MPs' STAFFING
Exemptions Applied:
Section 40