Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme

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

Regulation 4(3) provides that:

In a case in which this regulation has effect, a public authority may, for the purpose of its estimate, take account only of the costs it reasonably expects to incur in relation to the request in—

(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.

IPSA does not have a separate category for claims relating to the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme and therefore in order to provide this information it would be necessary to go through all the invoices for each of the claims listed under the category of “MP Travel” which do not provide further information under “Details”, to determine if it was a claim for the AFPS, then to make a note of the MP name and amount.

There are 20,835 claim lines for a total of 455 MPs in 2021-22 and it would take well over 18 hours to check them all. It is possible to identify some relevant claims and this information is available on our website, where IPSA publishes the details of all MPs’ business costs in accordance with our Publication Schedule. In some cases, an MP has added further information in the description field of their claim, which means that some claims relating to the AFPS can be identified.

This information can be found at Annual Publications. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to the section Individual Business Costs, then download and save the .csv file for the year 2021-2022. You then need to do a search for “AFPG” and “armed”.

As this information is available from our website it is subject to a Refusal Notice under section 21 of the FOIA, because it is reasonably accessible by other means. We would be happy to check for claims made by other MPs if you provided a list of names for us to search.