Covid-19 allowance for staffing

I can confirm that we hold information relevant to your request.

At the start of the lockdown in March 2020, IPSA made the decision to increase MPs’ office costs budget to support the move to homeworking for their staff members. The £10,000 was added to the existing office costs’ budget and subject to the same rules. Any amounts left over at the end of March 2020 were made available to individual MPs in their 2020-21 budgets.

All amounts claimed by MPs are published, in line with IPSA’s schedule of publication, normally four or five months after being processed. IPSA will be publishing the details of MPs’ budgets as part of its annual publication in December 2020, which will show the total amounts spent in the 2019-20 year. As the £10,000 allowance is split between the financial years, total expenditure in the 2020-21 financial year is not due to be published until December 2021.

The information relating to the budgets for the last financial year is therefore subject to a Refusal Notice under section 22(1) of FOIA, because it is intended for future publication.

Section 22(1) is a qualified exemption and requires us to consider the public interest test.

MPs’ have a certain amount of time in which to submit their claims, and this period has been extended due to the pandemic. Submitted claims then undergo a period of validation and reconciliation before being published. While we may hold some information on claims for the current financial year, these will be incomplete and also subject to validation and reconciliation.

In light of this validation and reconciliation procedure and because IPSA already has a schedule of routinely publishing this information, I find the public interest in withholding the information outweighs the public interest in disclosure at this time.