Payment card suspensions Angela Crawley MP

I can confirm that we hold information relevant to your request, please see the below.

Questions one and two

The information you have requested is available on our website. As part of our obligations under the Freedom of Information Act we publish previous responses on our disclosure log and the response at the following link, which was published in September 2022 provides the information you have requested.

As the information you have requested is therefore already available on our website, it is exempt from disclosure under section 21 of the FOIA (information accessible to applicant by other means). This means that we do not need to provide you with copies of the information you have asked for.

Questions three and five

The information you have requested has also been disclosed via the disclosure log, at the same link above. Having searched our records, we located 12 suspensions for Angela Crawley between 2015 and 2018. Nine of these were caused by outstanding reconciliations and three were due to offsetting.

Question four

The information you have requested is available on our website and so is also exempt from disclosure under section 21 of the FOIA. As part of our routine publication IPSA publishes all claims data for MPs.

This can be found on IPSA’s website on our ‘Annual budgets, costs and claims’ webpage. Scroll down to the bottom and select ‘Individual Business Costs’. Download the spreadsheet for the year you would like to see.

To view costs for Angela Crawley, filter the ‘Name’ (column E) and select the MP. Alternatively, you can use the A- Z list at Search MP by name to search for specific MPs.

Question six

The information you have requested is exempt from disclosure under Section 38(1)(b) of the FOIA. This exemption relates to the protection of the physical or mental health of an individual.

The murder of Sir David Amess MP in 2021, and more recent criminal convictions for stalking, harassment and attacks on MPs since 2018 has highlighted that threats had led to actual attacks. Even after an individual ceases to work as, or for, an MP the risk may remain.

Some former MPs and staff have moved on to other roles which keep them in the public spotlight with continuing risks to themselves, their families and those associated.

While the information withheld by itself does not comprise sensitive or security-related details, such as private addresses or personal contact details, as disclosure is to the wider public domain, the information may be exploited and misrepresented by individuals with malicious intent to foment aggression towards MPs and their staff by equating payment card suspension with debt or overspending at a time of national cost-of-living crisis.

IPSA takes its transparency obligations under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009 very seriously. We recognise that disclosing the names of the MPs whose payment cards had been temporarily suspended would potentially allow the public to gain a better understanding of how effectively public finances were being managed. It may also be argued that publication could encourage more efficient reconciliation of payment cards by MPs’ offices.

In our response to the previous FOI published in September 2022 referenced above, we disclosed anonymised information about individual incidences of payment card suspension and duration for each (unidentified) MP’s office. This provided the public with information about the overall rates and duration of the suspension, without exposing MPs and their staff to the risks outlined above. In general, most suspensions are for relatively short periods resulting from administrative deadlines being missed and are likely to have been since resolved.

IPSA finds that the contribution to public understanding and transparency when taken in combination with information already published is outweighed when balanced against the strong likelihood that individuals named would nevertheless be subjected to heightened risks arising from disclosure. IPSA, therefore, maintains that the public interest in withholding this information outweighs the public interest in disclosure at this time.