Expenditure incurred by IPSA's Communications team

IPSA’s Communications team is responsible for a variety of functions, including but not limited to: communicating IPSA’s role and functions to the public, managing all internal communications including the staff intranet, newsletter and all-staff events, coordinating meetings with and visits by international delegations, preparing briefings for senior management and managing IPSA’s external communications, such as the website, social media and regular bulletins to all MPs and their staff.

IPSA holds the information that you request.

As noted above, the team’s budget for the 2018-19 financial year is £34,290.00. The actual spend against this estimate, as of 31 October 2018, is £16.110.00. Please find below a breakdown of this spend by expenditure type.

Table 1: 2018-19 budget by category

Actual expenditure comprises payments to third-party suppliers for services such as daily news cuttings, as well as reimbursement to IPSA staff for costs incurred in the exercise of their roles. Please find attached receipts and invoices associated to this expenditure.

We have withheld a small amount of information from these invoices, such as account numbers, invoice numbers and other sensitive financial information, which if disclosed, could prejudice the financial security of the organisation or individuals. We have withheld this information 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. In our opinion the public interest in protecting the financial security of IPSA and its staff outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information.

Please find below the aggregate spend on staff-related costs for Press Office staff for each of the last three financial years. These amounts include all salary related costs, including on-costs.

Table 2: Press Office staff costs per year

We also publish information about our staffing arrangements as an organisation on our website.

As a public authority, IPSA is subject to annual auditing by the National Audit Office. No further reviews of spending have been undertaken.