Copies of invoices/receipts for MPs

I can confirm that we hold information relevant to your request however, after careful consideration, we have determined that it is subject to a Refusal Notice under section 12(1) of the FOIA.

Section 12(1) – cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit

IPSA is not required to comply with a request for information if it estimates that the cost of compliance would exceed the appropriate limit set by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 (the "Fees Regulations"). Regulation 5(2) states that the costs of more than one request can be aggregated if the requests which are to be aggregated relate “to any extent” to the same or similar information. Different questions within a single piece of correspondence count as separate requests for this purpose.

In Fitzsimmons v IC and DCMS (EA/2007/0124), the Tribunal found that “same or similar“…“requires only a very loose connection between the two sets of information” (para. 26), that is, an overarching theme or common thread running between the requests in terms of the nature of the information that has been requested. The fact that requests concern different individuals does not mean that they cannot be similar. The Fees Regulations state that requests received within 60 consecutive working days can be aggregated.

During the period from 18 August to 01 September 2021 IPSA received 10 requests for invoices. Each request, excepting the last, listed between 99 and 101 separate claims. In total, information was requested for 940 claims submitted by 340 MPs.

Although each request had been sent from a different email address, for the purposes of the Fees Regulations the requests have been aggregated on the grounds that they emanate from related sources, for the following reasons:

1. Each request asked for invoices relating to between 99 and 101 claims, with the exception of the final request which was for 44 claims.

2. The first request received did not include MPs’ names. IPSA responded by asking for MP names and years to bring extraction work below the appropriate limit. Subsequent requests incorporated MP name and financial years. This suggests communication between the first and subsequent requestors.

3. Each request listed MPs in alphabetical order according to first name

4. The requests were submitted in alphabetical order, the first covering claims from Adam Holloway to Anne McLaughlin; the second from Anne McLaughlin to Christopher Elmore; the third from Christopher Elmore to Flick Drummond, and so forth

5. Each request continued from the point the previous had stopped, to the extent that claims for a single MP would appear at the bottom of the list for one request and continue at the top for the next.

6. The requests followed the same tabular format: claim reference; financial year; the MP’s name.

7. The number of claims listed in each request was just low enough to fall within the appropriate limit according to our method for calculating costs. Our calculations have been published in the FOI Disclosure Log in response to previous freedom of information requests.

8. A sampling exercise found that the claims related to the same expense type, "Bought-in services".

From this it is reasonable to assume that the requests were submitted by a number of individuals in contact with each other who were systematically working through a list of MPs, to submit a series of requests, each of which would fall just below the threshold of the appropriate limit. For these reasons, IPSA has aggregated your request with the other nine requests for the purposes of assessing costs under the Fees Regulations.

Cost and time assessment

Under the Fees Regulations, a public authority can only take into account the time it reasonably expects to incur in the tasks set out in Regulation 4(3)(a)-(d) (the "Allowable Tasks"). For IPSA this is set at 18 hours or £450.

The Regulations allow for the following activities to be taken into account:

• determining whether the information is held

• locating the information, or a document containing it

• retrieving the information, or a document containing it

• extracting the information from a document containing it

We estimate that the cost of complying with the aggregated requests would exceed the appropriate limit. We have identified over 940 lines of information relevant to the requests which would need to be analysed to extract the relevant information. We estimate that this work would take us approximately 126 hours to process, which is over the appropriate limit of 18 hours.

It is for these reasons that your request is refused under section 12(1) of the FOIA.

How to revise your request

To bring the requests within the appropriate limit we would suggest:

• restricting the number of MPs, or

• restricting the number of claim lines, and

• allowing more time between requests (60 days)

You may also wish to nominate a single point of contact. If there is something specific that you are trying to find out, it would help us to know as we may be able to suggest other ways of revising the request.