MPs who have submitted claims to "Big Ben Partnerships" since 2010

I can confirm that we hold information relevant to your request, but it is subject to a Refusal Notice under section 12(1) of FOIA.

This exemption applies because we estimate that the cost of complying with your request would exceed the appropriate limit as laid down in the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004. For IPSA this amount is £450 or 18 hours’ work.

In calculating whether the appropriate limit has been reached, an organisation can take into account the cost of:

(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.

MPs are not required to confirm the names of suppliers separately from the evidence they provide, nor does IPSA record the names of suppliers when handling claims; we only record the type of service claimed for. Our expense system does not, therefore, have a field where it is mandatory to enter the supplier.

The range of services advertised on Big Ben Partnership’s website indicates that claims could fall under a range of business cost types, including:

• Bought-in-services – Professional & consultancy

• Professional services

• Professional services wind-up

• Research services

• Advertising

• Recruitment

• Website – design/production

• Website – design/production wind up

To identify claims made for services provided by Big Ben, we would therefore have to review all receipts submitted since 2010 under all of the above expense types in order to identify which claims were invoiced to MPs by the Big Ben Partnership.

This would be a significant amount of work. For example, for the period 2019/20 this would involve searching 4,017 claim lines. As part of the estimated cost calculation, we were able to reduce this to 1,794 claim lines by eliminating anything obviously out of scope. We have estimated that it takes approximately two minutes to find, export and review each receipt to identify the supplier.

For 2019/20 alone – even using the reduced figure – it would take us an estimated 59.8 hours to locate, export and extract the information requested. This process would then need to be repeated for each year since 2010.

Claims prior to 1 April 2019 are stored in our old finance system. Locating and extracting receipts and invoices from this system takes around five minutes for each claim line.

As the estimated number of hours exceeds 18, your request has been refused under section 12.

If you are able to narrow your request to specific claim numbers, years, or MP it may be possible to provide information within the allotted time.

You may also wish to search each of the published ‘Individual business costs’ spreadsheets for the years in question as occasionally the names of suppliers have been provided in the free text ‘Details’ column.

Our website has details of published claims.