MPs expenses

Dear Sir / Madam

For the purposes of the Freedom of Information Act, this request
will have been received on the 20th January 2008. Please
immediately confirm the receipt of this request.

I would like to request all receipts, expense claims, payments and
associated meta-data that have been scanned and redacted ready for
release as part of the budgeted £950,000 work to make Members'
expenses available at receipt-level following on from the
Information Tribunal decision EA/2007/0060-63,0122,0123,0131 [1] &
subsequent High Court appeal [2]. To be clear, I'm not interested
in the specific information related to ACA that was released
following this judgement, but of the work that the Commons
authorities has been doing to make this information freely
available via your publication scheme.

Parliament Standard Note SN/PC/04732 [3] (page 7) says that work is
underway on behalf of the House by the Stationery Office and House
staff in both scanning and editing/approving the information ready
for release. I am only therefore only interested in the individual
items of "work" that have been completed and cleared for release.

My preferences for receipt of the data is for electronic data
transfer at a mutually agreeable date, location & file transfer
mechanism.

I envisage that you may want to apply exceptions to release of this
data. I would therefore ask you to carefully consider the following
points.

__ Section 77(1) Destruction of records

IMPORTANT - I would like to draw your attention to the Freedom of
Information Act Section 77(1) relating to the destruction of
records -

77 Offence of altering etc. records with intent to prevent
disclosure (1) Where— (a) a request for information has been made
to a public authority, and (b) under section 1 of this Act or
section 7 of the [1988 c. 29.] Data Protection Act 1998, the
applicant would have been entitled (subject to payment of any fee)
to communication of any information in accordance with that
section, any person to whom this subsection applies is guilty of an
offence if he alters, defaces, blocks, erases, destroys or conceals
any record held by the public authority, with the intention of
preventing the disclosure by that authority of all, or any part, of
the information to the communication of which the applicant would
have been entitled.

In addition, the Information Commissioner guidelines [4] state:

* "If information is held when a FOIA request is received, you may
be able to lawfully say that you do not hold it if it would
normally be destroyed before the deadline for responding. However,
you should as a matter of good practice suspend any planned
destruction and consider disclosure as usual."

* "Destroying requested information outside of your normal policies
is unlawful and may be a criminal offence if done to prevent
disclosure."

* "As a matter of good practice, you should keep all requested
information for at least 6 months to allow for appeals to the
Information Commissioner."

The Freedom of Information Act legislation as it stands today does
not include the Freedom of Information (Parliament) Order 2009 that
is being voted on in Parliament on 22 January 2009. There can
therefore be no plans for destruction of these records today beyond
your normal record retention policy. I therefore demand that none
of the records requested are destroyed.

__ Section 22 - Information intended for future publication

I understand that FOI requests received since the High Court
decision have been rejected using FOI exemption Section 22 -
Information intended for future publication - for example, see the
reply made via the WhatDoTheyKnow.com website [5]

Section 22 is a qualified exemption, and given the High Court's
view of the Public Interest in favour of disclosure, and given the
risk of the FOIA being changed to exempt this information, there
can be now be no reason for witholding the requested, vetted
information as it currently stands.

In addition the work requested would already have been vetted to be
suitable for release under FOIA Section 1(1)(b).

__ Section 12 - Excessive costs

If you are considering applying Section 12 (Excessive costs),
please provide a breakdown of your estimated costs in line with
official guidance. I understand that this data has been scanned
into a document management system, and that redaction/editing would
take place in this system, and those records which had been cleared
for release also flagged as such in the system. Therefore I do not
believe that it would take more than £600 (3.5 man-days) to write a
query to extract and dump the required data to disk.

-- Section 1(1)(a) - Information held

If you consider that the information would not be "held" at the end
of the 20 working day period, then I would ask you to check Section
1(4): "The information [...] is the information in question held at
the time when the request is received, except that account may be
taken of any amendment or deletion [to the information] made
between that time and the time when the information is to be
communicated under subsection (1)(b), being an amendment or
deletion that would have been made regardless of the receipt of the
request."

Today the information is "held", so Section 1(4) only applies if
the destruction of the records is planned. As at today, there can
therefore be plan for destruction of the information (the Order may
not get approved), only that the information is intended for future
publication.

The ICO says "Destruction outside of retention and disposal
schedules: If information is held when a FOIA request is received,
destroying it outside of your normal records management policies
will result in a breach of the Act." [4]

I have copied this request to the Information Commissioner, as I am
extremely worried that Section 77 may be breached before the
statutory 20 working day limit you have to reply to this request.

Yours faithfully

Alex Skene

[1]
http://www.informationtribunal.gov.uk/Do...

[2] http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admi...

[3]
http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/res...

[4]
http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/l...

[5]
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/br...