Bulletin, 7 March (IPSA Online maintenance, MP staff pay and budgets, data publication)

Date published: 7 March 2024

We hope you're keeping well.

Please note that IPSA Online will be unavailable from 1700 on Friday 8 March to 0900 on Tuesday 12 March 2024 for planned maintenance.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

This week’s bulletin contains information about:

  • MP staff pay and budgets

  • MPs’ business costs publication – 14 March

As a reminder, please reconcile any outstanding lines by 5pm tomorrow, to avoid the risk of your card being suspended after this deadline.

MP staff pay and budgets

Last month, we provided you with the provisional budgets for 2024/25, which we shared through our Bulletin. We took this step, with Mr Speaker’s agreement, to ensure you had the budget information you need to plan as early as possible.

On Tuesday, Richard Lloyd, our Chair, and Ian Todd, our Chief Executive, appeared in front of the Speaker’s Committee for IPSA, who are responsible for approving our budgets. Following this, we can confirm the budgets for MPs' offices for the coming financial year.

We also wanted to inform you that IPSA’s Board has agreed a 6.2% increase to staffing budgets, to facilitate a cost-of-living increase for MPs’ staff. This is in line with the 2023 ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings data reflecting the annual change in pay for public administration roles.

The Board also chose to repeat the exercise undertaken in 2023 to benchmark the MP’s staff salary ranges against the market rates for 2024/25. This was to ensure that salary rates were appropriate for the coming year at both the minimum and the maximum pay range.

The website and documents including the contract tool, calculators, and pay ranges will be available by Tuesday 12 March.

Budgets

MPs’ business costs publication – 14 March

Next week, on 14 March, we will be publishing details of MPs’ business costs for October and November 2023.

Please ensure you check your data before publication using the Publication preview service.

If you have any queries about your data, please contact us as soon as possible.