Copies of receipts for MPs' business costs since 2018

Request

In your emails you requested the following information:

  • The receipt for any expense's claims submitted since the year 2018 until the date of this request under the following budget categories: Miscellaneous

  • The receipt for any expense's claims submitted since the year 2018 until the date of this request under the following budget categories: Office Costs

  • The receipt for any expense's claims submitted since the year 2018 until the date of this request under the following budget categories: Staffing, but only the sub-category of bought-in-services

  • The receipt for any expense's claims submitted since the year 2018 until the date of this request under the following budget categories: Staff Travel, but on the journey types of: extended travel, other travel UK

  • The receipt for any expense's claims submitted since the year 2018 until the date of this request under the following budget categories: MP Travel, but only under the journey types: extended travel, Other MP Travel, as per 9.3c, diverted journey, European travel

For each of the following MPs:

  • Yvette Cooper

  • Lisa Nandy

  • Emily Thornberry

  • Thangam Debbonaire

  • Louise Haigh

  • Anneliese Dodds

  • Angela Rayner

  • Rachel Reeves

  • David Lammy

Response

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

Section 12(1) – cost of compliance exceeds the 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.

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.

On 21 April 2022, IPSA received 45 requests from you. In total, information was requested for 2,491 claims submitted by the nine named MPs.

Although each request had been sent in a different email, for the purposes of the Fees Regulations the requests have been aggregated on the grounds that each request asked for receipts relating to the same five cost categories repeated across the nine named MPs, which we believe meets the definition of “same or similar” in Fitzsimmons.

For these reasons, IPSA has aggregated your 45 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 2,490 lines of information held in two different systems relevant to your requests which would need to be analysed to extract the relevant information. We estimate that this work would take us a minimum of approximately 127.1 hours to process, which is over the appropriate limit of 18 hours.

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 one or more of the following:

  • Restricting the number of MPs

  • Restricting the number of claim lines

  • Reducing the number of years

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 requests.

Ref:
RFI-202204-10 to RFI-202204-54
Disclosure:
9 May 2022
Categories:
COPIES OF RECEIPTSMPs' OFFICE COSTSMPs' STAFFINGMPs' TRAVEL
Exemptions Applied:
Section 12(1)