MPs' claims for legal costs

I can confirm that we hold information relevant to your request however, after careful consideration, we have determined that it is subject to a Refusal Notice under section 12(1) of the FOIA.

IPSA is not required to comply with a request for information if it estimates that the cost of compliance would exceed the appropriate limit set by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 (the "Fees Regulations").

Under the Fees Regulations a public authority can only take into account the time it reasonably expects to incur in the tasks set out in regulation 4(3)(a)-(d) (the "Allowable Tasks". For IPSA this is set at 18 hours or £450.

(a) determining whether it holds the information,

(b) locating the information, or a document which may contain the information,

(c) retrieving the information, or a document which may contain the information, and

(d) extracting the information from a document containing it.

[….]

An authority can take into account the costs attributable to the time that persons (both the authority’s staff and external contractors) are expected to spend on these activities. Such costs are calculated at £25 per hour per person for all authorities regardless of the actual cost or rate of pay, which means that the limit will be exceeded if these activities exceed... 18 hours for all other authorities.

The four activities are sequential, covering the retrieval process of the information from the public authority’s information store.

We estimate that the cost of complying with your request would exceed the appropriate. We have calculated the time it would take to provide the information for the financial year 2020-21 only and estimate this alone would take 29 hours. The reason for this is that there is no separate expense category for legal costs. IPSA would need to retrieve and extract all claims listed under ‘Bought-in Services’, ‘Professional & Consultancy’, and then check the individual invoices to see if they relate to legal costs. IPSA would need to follow the same process for years 2019-20 and 2021 to date. Prior to 2019, a separate system was used for recording and managing MPs’ business costs and information from this system would need to be identified by individual MPs, then retrieved and checked.

It is for this reason that your request is refused under section 12(1) of the FOIA.

How to revise your request

To bring your request within the appropriate limit we would suggest:

• Requesting information since 2019, and

• Identifying individual MPs, and

• Restricting your request to one financial year only.

You may want to look on IPSA’s website at Annual budgets, costs and claims and scroll down to the files on Individual Business Costs.