Rejected claims by Stewart Hosie and Chris Laws

Taking your requests for information in turn:

• Please provide full details of expenses claim reference 507710 made by Stewart Hosie MP on May 26, 2016, including a copy of any receipts and correspondence related to this claim.

Under the MPs' Scheme of Business Costs and Expenses ('the Scheme'), any MP may apply for contingency funding when they incur expenditure or liability for expenditure which is not covered by any of the other budgets set out in the Scheme. Such applications are considered by IPSA's contingency panel, who consider:

• whether there are exceptional circumstances warranting additional support,

• whether the MP could reasonably have been expected to take any action to avoid the circumstances, and

• whether the MP's performance of parliamentary functions will be significantly impaired by a refusal of the application.

Details of this claim are already published on our website. Please click here to view a copy of the application made for contingency funding.

• In addition, please provide details (with copies of receipts) of all rejected expenses claims made by Mr Hosie, and Chris Law MP, throughout their respective terms as MPs at Westminster.

Details of all claims for business costs and expenses are published on our website. This includes the status of the claim: whether or not it was paid. Details of all claims made each financial year can be downloaded from each MP's page, or details of all claims made by all MPs each financial year can be downloaded here.

Please click here to download invoices for these claims. Please note that some of the claims were rejected due to a lack of supporting evidence; in such cases, no invoices are therefore held.

Exemptions applied

We have withheld information from these documents relating to third-party personal data (section 40(2) FOIA), and information which if disclosed could endanger the safety of an individual (section 38 FOIA).

Personal data, as defined by the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) has been withheld in accordance with section 40 of the FOIA. For reference, section 40(2) provides that personal information about third parties is exempt information if disclosure would breach the fair processing principle (Principle 1) of the DPA, where it would be unfair to those persons or is confidential. You can find out more information about personal data and FOI via guidance from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) on their website: http://ico.org.uk. 

Section 38(1)(b) of the FOIA states that information is exempt if its disclosure under the FOI Act would, or would be likely to, endanger the safety of any individual. After considering the nature of the withheld information it is our opinion that were a disclosure to be made into the public domain it is likely that this information could be used to endanger the safety of the individuals who rely upon these locations for accommodation. Although we recognise the public interest in transparency surrounding the publishing of this information there is also a strong public interest in ensuring that as an organisation we are able to protect our service users from threats to their safety. In our opinion the public interest in protecting the personal safety of MPs’ outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information.