Information relation to Labour Party Properties

Your request falls into two parts:

• Copies of all invoices that relate to claims made under the ‘Constituency Rental’ category by the subset of MPs specified in your request, since May 2010; and

• Copies of all invoices where the name of the supplier is ‘Labour Party Properties Ltd’ for claims made by the subset of MPs specified in your request, since May 2010

IPSA holds the information that you request.

Taking the parts of your request in turn:

• IPSA does not, as a matter of course, publish images of receipts or invoices supporting claims. We believe that the information we proactively publish on IPSA’s Publication website provides a significant amount of detail and gives a clear picture of what MPs are claiming for and affords reassurance that claims are both appropriate for MPs to carry out their parliamentary functions, and in accordance with the rules set out in the MPs’ Scheme of Business Costs and Expenses.

Our approach is to provide the information released on IPSA’s publication website relating to these claims, as well as all additional information contained on invoices.  Exemptions in the FOIA may apply to some of the information, for instance, where the information contains bank details or account numbers.

We undertook a test to estimate the amount of time it would take to locate, retrieve and extract the additional information held on the hardcopy invoices for the subset of MPs requested.  We estimate that it would take 61.50 hours of staff time which takes us over the appropriate cost limit of £450 (part 1 of Schedule 1 of the Freedom of Information Act).  Consequently, IPSA is not obliged to respond to your request (see section 12(1), FOIA).

• Claims made in relation to ‘Labour Party Properties’ could relate to any expense type in the Office Costs Expenditure budget. In order to comply with your request, we would be required to manually identify all those hardcopy invoices where the supplier is ‘Labour Party Properties’ in relation to claims made for the subset of MPs requested.

We undertook a test to estimate the amount of time it would take to identify any such claims.  We estimate that it would take 49.35 hours of staff time to identify the information held, which takes us over the appropriate cost limit of £450 (part 1 of Schedule 1 of the Freedom of Information Act).  Consequently, IPSA is not obliged to respond to your request (see section 12(1), FOIA).

We should note that this does not include the additional staff time that would be required to retrieve and extract this information, once the relevant claims had been identified.

You may be interested to know that IPSA is publishing information relating to constituency offices, including the name of the landlord, in the autumn of this year, which may contain some of the information you have requested.