Expenses – members of parliament – parliamentary privilege – additional costs allowance

Corporate Officer of the House of Commons v (1) Information Commissioner (2) Heather Brooke (3) Ben Leapman (4) Jonathan Michael Ungoed-Thomas: DC (Sir Igor Judge [president of the Queen’s Bench Division], Lord Justice Latham, Mr Justice Blake): 16 May 2008

The appellant Corporate Officer appealed under section 59 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 against a decision of the Information Tribunal allowing an order for disclosure of information relating to the parliamentary Additional Costs Allowance.

The allowance was payable to Members of Parliament to reimburse them for expenses associated with staying away overnight from their main UK residences for the purpose of performing parliamentary duties. The House of Commons was expressly among the public authorities to which the act applied. The House of Commons had published information about the total sums paid annually in respect of the allowance to 14 MPs. The House of Commons adopted a scheme for claims for allowances following the enactment of the act and adopted a publication scheme approved by the commissioner.

The respondents exercised their rights under section 1 of the act to request further details, including the claim forms and supporting documents. The applications were refused and the respondents complained to the Information Commissioner under section 50.

He found that the respondents should be provided with a breakdown of the total annual amounts claimed by each MP for accommodation allowances in the specified years. Acting through the Corporate Officer, the House of Commons appealed to the tribunal under section 57 against the order for disclosure. The respondents successfully cross-appealed and the tribunal found that, notwithstanding the entitlement of MPs to their privacy, the disclosure was not unwarranted and the relevant information should be disclosed in full.

The tribunal also concluded that it would not be appropriate to introduce a general exception precluding disclosure of the addresses of MPs. The Corporate Officer submitted that: (1) the tribunal misdirected itself by failing to take into account the reasonable expectations of MPs about how information about allowance claims would be made available to the public following the adoption of the publication scheme, and argued that this constituted an error of law; (2) the disclosure of an individual private residential address represented an intrusion into a core issue of privacy and it was neither proportionate nor necessary for the addresses to which the allowance related to be disclosed to the public.

Held: (1) The nature of the legitimate public interest engaged by the present applications was obvious. The expenditure of public money through the payment of MPs’ salaries and allowances was a matter of reasonable interest to taxpayers. It was impossible to conclude that the tribunal simply ignored the issue of MPs’ reasonable expectations. The argument had been carefully listed as a consideration and a clear reason was given for its conclusion. There was no misdirection or other error of law which would justify interfering with the decision of the tribunal.

To the extent that it might have been suggested that information beyond the publication scheme would never be disclosed, such a representation would conflict with the fundamental purpose of section 1(1), which was a distinct obligation to the publication scheme obligations imposed under section 19. MPs could not conduct their affairs on the basis that recently enacted legislation did not apply to them, or that the House of Commons was permitted to suspend or dispense with such legislation without expressly amending or repealing it. To the extent that it was suggested that the information would not normally be disclosed, MPs making a claim for the allowance would nevertheless be expected to do so within the rules in effect at the time. Once it had emerged, as the tribunal found, that the system was deeply flawed, public scrutiny of the details of individual claims was inevitable. In such circumstances it would have been unreasonable for MPs to expect anything else.

(2) The tribunal had concluded that the allowances system was so deeply flawed that the necessity of full disclosure was convincingly established such that only the most pressing privacy needs should be permitted to prevail. All the necessary elements to the decision-making process were carefully balanced by the tribunal and no basis was shown to justify interference. If the arrangements for control of the allowances scheme were to change, then the issue of the privacy and security of MPs and their families might lead to a different conclusion. However, the tribunal was required to act on the evidence available to it and to act accordingly.

The present court could not interfere with the tribunal’s decision on the basis of what the appropriate outcome might be if the tribunal were not addressing the deeply flawed system which it believed had established the necessity of full disclosure, which included the addresses to which the allowance forms applied.

Appeal dismissed.

Nigel Giffin QC, Karen Steyn (instructed by Treasury Solicitors) for the appellant; James Goudie QC, Akhlaq Choudhury (instructed by Mark Thorogood) for the first respondent; Hugh Tomlinson QC (instructed by Simons Muirhead & Burton) for the second respondent; Simon McKay (solicitor-advocate) (instructed by McKay Law) for the third respondent; Philip Coppel (instructed by Bates Wells & Braithwaite) for the fourth respondent.