List of MPs who have purchased surveillance equipment

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

IPSA is not required to comply with a request for information if it estimates that the cost of compliance would exceed the appropriate limit as set by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 (the Fees Regulations).

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:

(a) determining whether it holds the information,

(b) locating the information, or a document which may contain the information,

(c) retrieving the information, or a document which may contain the information, and

(d) extracting the information from a document containing it.

We estimate that the cost of complying with your request would exceed the appropriate limit. Our estimate is based on the cost of providing information for one financial year for the procurement of surveillance equipment. Your request neither specified a date range nor did it state whether you were just interested in “Ring” type doorbells.

MPs procure security equipment in two ways: either directly via an approved supplier, who also offers other services or by purchasing equipment and then submitting a claim to IPSA for reimbursement.

For information about MPs who had used the direct supplier, it would be necessary to review the report provided by the supplier to IPSA. Each line of the report would need to be checked to see whether it related to the purchase of surveillance equipment, or something else. There are 549 MPs on the report.

To provide the information about claims submitted to IPSA, it would be necessary to run a report on those MPs who had assigned claims to the security budget. The next step would be to log into our expenses system and locate the relevant documents which were submitted to support the claim. These documents would need to be checked for more information about the claim.

There are currently 50 MPs who have assigned claims to the security budget, however, they may also have claimed for surveillance equipment via other budgets, for example, general office costs and locating this information would be extremely difficult.

It is estimated that providing information on the number of MPs who have procured surveillance equipment either via the approved supplier, or by submitting claims to IPSA assigned to the security budget, for the last financial year would take approximately 23 hours. It is for this reason that IPSA relies on section 12(1).

How to revise your request

To bring your request within the appropriate limit we would suggest:

• restricting the number of MPs, or

• specifying a shorter time period