Pay increases awarded to staff employed by Aiden Burley

Request

All pay rises given to the staff of MP Aiden Burley between May 2010 and the present day March 6 2012


Response

IPSA holds some of the information that you request.

MPs are required to pay staff employed after May 2010 on payscales set by IPSA and using IPSA contracts. However, MPs are the employers of their staff and may set the specific pay for their staff according to the staff member’s skills and abilities and requirements of the post. MPs are of course required to keep to the overall staffing expenditure limit when deciding how to pay their staff.

In keeping with their status as the employer, we do not require MPs to justify pay rises for their staff where they will remain within the pay bands and overall Staffing Expenditure budget. However we do provide guidance to the MPs’ Scheme of Business Costs and Expenses that states:

When setting pay for their staff, MPs should have regard to the terms of the wider public sector pay freeze. In recognition of this freeze, IPSA does not expect to receive any requests for salary uplifts for MPs’ staff, except where the staff in question have taken on significant extra responsibilities.

Given the small number of staff employed, we feel that the disclosure of pay rises given to staff members would enable members of the public, including other staff members, to identify and establish individuals and information about individual salaries and where, within the IPSA pay scale a particular salary may sit.  We are therefore withholding this information under section 40 (personal information) of the FOI Act as the information constitutes personal data. Section 40(2) provides that personal data about third parties is exempt information if one of the conditions set out in section 40(3) is satisfied. (Please see http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/36/contents). Under the FOI Act disclosure of this information would breach the fair processing principle contained in the Data Protection Act (DPA), where it would be unfair to those persons or is confidential.

You may however, wish to note that we do publish information on annualised expenditure on the staffing budget by each MP. This information can be found on IPSA’s Publication website and will be updated to include information 2011-12 following the end of the current financial year.  The total expenditure on the staff budget may reflect pay increases and/or changes in staffing during the year.

Ref:
FOI2012-A020
Disclosure:
26 March 2012
Categories:
MPs' STAFFING
Exemptions Applied:
Section 40