IT purchases (2021)

Response

In the first instance please note that whilst the House of Commons and the House of Lords are two separate public authorities in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA), the Parliamentary Digital Service (PDS) is a joint, bicameral service providing information and communications technology services for both Houses of Parliament. Therefore, some information below covers both Houses of Parliament, and where this is the case, it is specified. Requests for information relating solely to the House of Lords should be directed to them.

1. Breakdown of the number of new electronic devices purchased by your organisation and the estimated cost for each purchase [over the last 3x years, broken down by year]:
a. Laptops
b. Tablet computers
and
c. Mobile Phones

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

We hold information about IT equipment purchased for use by House of Commons and PDS users.
The number of new laptops, tablets and mobile phones purchased over the time period requested

Please note that for devices in the ‘external’ or ‘other organisation’ category, these are ordered by PDS, but paid for by the organisation receiving it. Similarly, for devices marked ‘HoC Members (IPSA)’, these are paid for by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), which provides MPs with budgets from which to meet their business and staffing costs.

We also hold pricelists for IT equipment, but only for 2019, 2020 and 2021 and only for laptops and tablets.
The pricelist for 2019

The 2020 pricelist has been published on our website so is therefore already available from a public source. This information is exempt from disclosure in accordance with section 21(1) and (2)(a) FOIA, which removes a public authority from the obligation to provide access to information which is already in the public domain. This is an absolute exemption and the public interest test does not apply. However, it may help you to know that information relevant to your request can be found on the IT area of our Transparency pages.

The 2021 pricelist is due for future publication. This information is therefore exempt from disclosure in accordance with section 22 FOIA. Section 22 is a qualified exemption, and accordingly we have to consider whether the public interest is in withholding the information or in disclosing it. The arguments for and against disclosure are detailed below. The general argument in favour of releasing information is that there is a public interest in being able to scrutinise aspects of the House of Commons where that information might be easy to access and will not prejudice the House. The argument against disclosure is the public interest in permitting public authorities to publish information in a manner and form and at a time of their own choosing. It is a part of the effective conduct of public affairs that the general publication of information is a conveniently planned and managed activity within the reasonable control of public authorities. Where the decision has been made in principle to publish, there is a reasonable entitlement to make arrangements to do so.
It may help you to know that this information will be published on the same page as the information for previous years, which is linked above. This publication is made annually, and the information for 2021 is planned for publication by the end of March 2022.

2. Detail on remote working software/licences purchased and estimated costs

We have interpreted this part of your request to be about the period of time during which remote working became necessary, i.e. from March 2020 onwards.

a. Number of Zoom accounts created

This information is held by the House of Commons.

There are currently 1,370 basic users across both Houses. Any parliamentary network account holder is able to create a basic Zoom account in our environment. This basic licence is free and enables users to join Zoom meetings as ‘parliament.uk’ users and to host short meetings.

We currently hold 975 Enterprise licences. These are allocated to House of Commons Members and their staff only. They are allocated, deactivated and re-allocated as required.

The cost of each licence depends on when it was purchased.

Licences purchased during the 2020/21 financial year (Table 1)

All of these licences expired at the end of the 2020/21 financial year.

Licences were purchased in the next financial year (Table 2)

b. Number of new office 365 account purchased

This information is held by the House of Commons.

The move to remote working led to the purchase of 400 Microsoft Office Remote Desktop Device Client Access Licences (CALs) (Table 3) While these licences were purchased for users across both Houses of Parliament, the costs were split between the House of Commons and the House of Lords on a 70/30 basis

c. cyber security software purchased

To provide this information, the House of Commons would have to undertake an extensive and complex exercise to identify, retrieve and collate it.

PDS holds information about spending on software from its own budgets and this is held on our finance system. However, in order to determine how much has been spent on each type of software within this information, we would have to review all transactions categorised as relating to software for the time period requested, line by line. This would entail opening the purchase order for each transaction, noting the brand name and description of the software and then confirming its functionality. In some cases, the functionality may be obvious and in others we may have to consult other sources, but for some cases it may be impossible to categorise the applications according to your request. A sample exercise carried out by PDS showed that where the functionality of the software could be obviously identified, reviewing each of the transactions took at least six minutes each. In the 2020/21 financial year, there are 484 transactions categorised as relating to software. Extrapolating this to the whole time period requested, it can be estimated that identifying, retrieving and collating the information in order to comply with your request would take at least 77 hours.

Section 12 FOIA only requires the House of Commons to comply with a request which would not exceed the appropriate limit of £600. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 24 working hours in determining whether the House holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting the information.

As this part of your request exceeds this limit, it is refused. We have tried to consider how your request could be narrowed such that it would take less time to fulfil such that we could comply with it. However, the information you are seeking, if we were able to identify it, would likely be withheld on the basis that its disclosure would prejudice the cyber security of the parliamentary network.