Details of office rental expenses of Andrew Rossindell MP

Request

Information relating to two payments totalling £18k listed as office rental expenses and made during the financial 2018/2018 and information explaining the increase in rent from the previous rate.


Response

IPSA holds the information you have requested.

The following information has been extracted from IPSA’s Online expense management system and correspondence files.

On 12th January 2019 Mr Rosindell emailed IPSA to say that there had been an increase from £7,500 rent per annum to £9,000. This was the first increase in rent since 2012. Mr Rossidell requested direct payment to the landlord, the Romford Conservative Association.

On receipt of lease documentation and a RICS valuation of the property confirming the new rent, IPSA set up a payment of £9,000 in January 2019 for the rent due for 1 April 2018 to 31 March 2019. A further payment of £9,000 was made in March 2019 as prepayment of annual rent for the period from 1 April 2019 to 31 March 2020.

The payments for both years were made in a smaller timeframe as there had been a delay submitting a copy of the lease and valuation.

A copy of the invoice for 2018/2019 has been provided to you as a PDF.

Please note that we have redacted some information from those receipts in accordance with section 31 (Law enforcement) and section 40 (Personal data) of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Information relating to:

  • Invoice numbers

  • Bank account numbers

This information has been withheld under section 31(1)(a) (Law enforcement) of the FOIA.

This section of the Act states that information is exempt if its disclosure under the FOIA would, or would be likely to, prejudice the prevention (or detection) or crime.

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 probable that this information could be traced back to sensitive commercial information which could be used for criminal activity. Although we recognise the public interest in transparency surrounding the publishing of information relating to MPs’ expenses, there is also a strong public interest in ensuring that we are able to protect our service users from the threat of being subjected to criminal activity.

In our opinion the public interest in protecting the security of MPs and third parties outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information.

This concludes our response to your request.

Ref:
CAS-154500
Disclosure:
30 October 2019
Categories:
MPs' ACCOMMODATION
Exemptions Applied:
Section 31, Section 40