Invoices for staff health and welfare costs claimed by Alex Cunningham

Request

You made a request for the receipts associated with three claims for staff health and welfare costs, details of who the costs were for, and the process for claiming business costs and expenses under the Scheme of MPs’ Business Costs and Expenses (‘the Scheme’)


Response

IPSA holds the information that you request.

The full process for making claims can be found at Chapter One of the Scheme, which can be found on our website.

MPs can delegate the submission of claims and certain payroll functions to one designated proxy (once they have been registered with IPSA), or where MPs are unable to fulfil their parliamentary functions, to another MP. MPs retain the responsibility for the claims.

Under the Scheme, Staffing costs may be claimed to meet the cost of staff who support MPs in performing their parliamentary functions. This includes the costs of payments for childcare vouchers for staff, cycle-to-work schemes, or other payments by way of salary sacrifice; as well as one-off health and welfare costs associated with provision of staffing support, such as eyesight tests and occupational health assessments.

Details of all claims made by MPs are published on our website. The following details of claims made by Alex Cunningham have already been published.

DateForm No.CategoryExpense TypeNotesStatusReimbursed
11/02/20150000410967StaffingHealth and Welfare CostsInvoice for Staff CycleschemeAllowed801.99
04/04/20170000575416StaffingHealth and Welfare CostsEye Test at T.D. [***] 4/4/2017Allowed21.50
01/04/20170000580016StaffingHealth and Welfare CostsEye Test at Boots 27/02/2017Tranaction Date 27/02/2017Allowed10.00

Please find attached copies of the receipts submitted in support of these claims. The names of junior staff members are ‘personal data’, as defined by the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA). As such, we are unable to disclose this information. Section 40(2) of the FOIA 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.  

In addition, we have withheld invoice numbers, account details and other sensitive financial information under Section 31(1)(a) (Law enforcement) of the FOI Act. This section of the Act states that information is exempt if its disclosure under the FOI Act would, or would be likely to, prejudice the prevention (or detection) or crime.

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 probable that this information could be traced back to sensitive personal or commercial information which could be used for criminal activity. Although we recognise the public interest in transparency surrounding the publishing of information relating to MPs’ expenses there is also a strong public interest in ensuring that we are able to protect our service users from the threat of being subjected to criminal activity. In our opinion the public interest in protecting the security of MPs and their property outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information.

Ref:
CAS-118092
Disclosure:
24 July 2018
Categories:
MPs' STAFFINGCOPIES OF RECEIPTS/INVOICES
Exemptions Applied:
Section 31