IT equipment returned from MPs (2022)

Response

We have interpreted your request as being about IT equipment from former MPs who either stood down or were defeated at the 2019 General Election.

Some information is held by the House of Commons in relation to your request.

We hold a list of the items of IT equipment not returned from these former MPs, the price paid for those items and their current value.

It may help you to know that at the end of the 2020/21 financial year, any outstanding items were formally written off, and ‘net book value’ refers to the estimated value of the items at that time, taking into account depreciation. Where there is a dash in this column, the net book value is zero. It may also help you to know the normal arrangements for collecting IT equipment have been severely disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic and by the restrictions on access to the parliamentary estate. As a result, we were not able to carry out collections for equipment for large parts of 2020 and 2021.

One entry in the table above has been redacted. This has been withheld by virtue of exemptions provided by the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA), further information about which is included below.

Section 38 – health and safety

Disclosure of this information to the public generally would be likely to endanger the physical or mental health of an individual. We have therefore concluded that the information requested is exempt by virtue of section 38(1)(a) FOIA. The exemption is qualified and is therefore subject to a public interest test, as follows.

We have considered the public interest in the disclosure of this information. There is a public interest in the House of Commons conducting its business in an open and transparent way, and in this case in particular, that it is transparent about the use of publicly-funded IT equipment and the speed at which it is being retrieved from former Members.

However, there is a countervailing public interest that the health and safety of Members and former Members of the House of Commons should be protected. In this case, the former Member is suffering from ill health. Because of this, they have not been included in the full process for retrieving loaned IT equipment and we have not pursued the matter of their outstanding IT equipment with them. Furthermore, we have reason to believe that former Members may be contacted by members of the media about this matter. Receiving media attention while in a state of ill health, and without any expectation that they would be included in these records, is likely to be distressing for the individual and have an effect on their mental or physical health.

In these circumstances, it is our view that the public interest in maintaining the exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information.

Section 40 – personal information

The name has also been withheld from the table by virtue of section 40(2) FOIA. This is because disclosure of this information to the public generally, in the House’s view, would not be consistent with the data protection principle found in Article 5.1(a) of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR). This is an absolute exemption and the public interest test does not apply.