Salaries, business costs and expenses relating to six MPs

Request

  1. Can I please have the data you hold on the salaries of these Members of Parliament: Frank Doran, Dame Anne Begg, Sir Malcolm Bruce, Eilidh Whiteford, Sir Robert Smith and Angus Robertson, for the period since the last General Election in 2010? Can you break them down according to what they receive them for ie. split the basic allowance from extras for serving on committees or otherwise, and label them as such.

  2. For the same Members of Parliament, can I please have details of all their business costs in the same time period, including dates, amount claimed and reason given?

  3. Thirdly, can I have details of all the expenses they have claimed in that same period, including the amount of money claimed and what it was claimed for? I would also like the dates and where possible, whether these expenses related to the MPs' work in Westminster or in their constituencies.

Response

IPSA holds the information that you request.

You may be aware that IPSA publishes all claims for business costs and expenses on our website every two months, three months in arrears.  You can view the published information via this link to our publication website. The following instructions may assist you in locating the information:

  1. Select ‘Aggregate Data’ via the menu bar at the top of the page.

  2. Select a financial year.

  3. Select an MP or a constituency

  4. Click ‘Find’ to retrieve the information.

This will provide a summary of all payments made to that MP for that financial year, including a breakdown of salary payments received. You can follow the links for each category of business cost and expense to see all claims made by the MP that financial year. These can then be exported to a spreadsheet format. Please note, however, that we do not necessarily hold information on the location at which an expense was incurred (outside of that already published on our website).

The FOIA states that information that is accessible by other means is not subject to release. Therefore, as the information you have requested is already available on our website, it is exempt from disclosure under section 21 of the FOIA (information accessible to applicant by other means).

For your reference, the next publication date is 14 May 2015, which will cover those claims processed by IPSA during December 2015 and January 2015.  Claims subsequently processed by IPSA will follow in future publications.

Section 22(1) of the FOIA states that information intended for future publication is exempt from release. We have considered whether the public interest in releasing the information outweighs the application of the exemption. It is our opinion that the public interest is best served by publishing a full list rather than on an ad hoc basis, as in this way a clear and complete set of information is published, avoiding any potential confusion. It is for this reason that the application of the exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosure at this stage.

Ref:
F1415-157
Disclosure:
30 March 2015
Categories:
GENERAL EXPENSES ENQUIRY
Exemptions Applied:
Section 21