Employment dates for all staff currently employed by MPs

Request

The date of arrival and the date of departure of each member of staff who has been employed by each MP currently sitting in the House of Commons. If the member of staff is still employed by the MP please could you just provide their arrival date.

I understand you may not be able to provide the staff members' name, but please could you provide the staff members’ job title.

Please could you provide this information spanning all the years the MP has been in post, and for which you have the data available.


Response

IPSA holds the information that you request.

Under the Scheme of MPs’ Business Costs and Expenses, (‘the Scheme’), staffing costs may be claimed to meet the cost of staff who support MPs in performing their parliamentary functions. IPSA provides model contracts and job descriptions for all staff employed by MPs, the specific conditions of which (such as pay and annual leave entitlement) can be set by the employing MP, usually within bands specified by IPSA.

Please find attached the data we hold regarding staff employed by all MPs currently sitting in the House of Commons. Where the employee is still employed, the ‘employee end date’ is left blank. Please note that in a small number of cases, we do not hold records of the job title; this has been marked where this is the case.

In accordance with section 40(2) of the FOIA and the Data Protection Act 1998, we have withheld any information which could lead to the identification of individual staff members. This includes:

  • The name of individual employees;

  • The job title, if used by less than five individuals; and

  • The name of the employing MP.

Information relating to living, identifiable individuals is ‘personal data’, as defined by the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) and is exempt from disclosure under section 40 of the FOIA. 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.

Ref:
CAS-111885
Disclosure:
7 May 2018
Categories:
MPs' STAFFING
Exemptions Applied:
Section 40