Invoice for a claim by Paul Williams MP for constituency office repair costs

IPSA holds the information that you request.

Under the Scheme of MPs’ Business Costs and Expenses (‘the Scheme’), an office costs budget is provided to meet the costs of renting, equipping and running MPs’ constituency offices. This includes the costs of necessary repairs.

Details of all claims made by MPs under the Scheme are published on our website. The following details relating to these claims have already been published.

View the invoices submitted in support of these claims. 

Some details relating to third parties, such as 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.