Details of claims for childcare and accommodation costs
Request
Which MP's claimed for childcare and accommodation costs for the Parliaments Saturday sitting on Saturday 19th October 2019.
Please provide the claim forms, the names of MP's, how much they claimed and what they claimed for.
I would also like to request all correspondence between MP's and the IPSA about claiming costs back for Saturday 19th October.
Response
I can confirm that we do hold information relevant to your request.
Information we hold about which MPs made claims for expenses relating to 19 October 2019 is subject to a Refusal Notice under sections 21 and 22 of the FOIA.
Section 21 applies to information which is reasonably available to the public, in case some of the claims by MPs may already be published on our website.
You will then need to amend the boxes in the top right, select: financial year 2019-20 and type Individual Claims. This will open an Excel sheet with all claims for that year. From there you can filter by date using Excel and then by expense type.
Section 22 applies to information intended for future publication. MPs have a certain amount of time in which to submit their claims after which there is a period of validation and reconciliation, before the information is ready for publication. Some claims relating to 19 October 2019 are still going through this process and will be published on the website in July 2020.
Section 22 is a qualified exemption and requires us to consider the public interest. In the light of the validation and reconciliation procedure and because IPSA already has schedule of routinely publishing this information, I find that the public interest in withholding the information outweighs the public interest in disclosure at this time.
In terms of copies of the claim forms, we do not hold this information. MPs must submit their claims via on online system, IPSA Online. If you were interested in seeing the receipts attached to these claims, you would need say which receipts you were interested in and the name of the MP.
The only correspondence we have is the Bulletin 10 October 2019 which was sent to MPs advising them that they could claim back expenses in the usual way.
Information on what MPs can claim for and the process of making a claim can be found in the Scheme of MPs’ Business Costs and Expenses, the Eleventh Edition would have applied for that period.
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- Ref:
- CAS-156891
- Disclosure:
- 29 May 2020
- Categories:
- GENERAL EXPENSES ENQUIRY
- Exemptions Applied:
- Section 21, Section 22