MPs IT equipment (2022)

Response

In the first instance, please note that the House does not keep an updated list of “missing” IT equipment loaned by Members. Instead, the House runs a report biannually of all instances where Members have reported to the House that equipment in their possession has been lost or stolen for that year via an incident report. We therefore only have a list of these incidents throughout the year, and do not keep a masterlist of incidents as they happen. We have therefore interpreted your request to mean all incidents so far during 2022 to the date of your request where current MPs have reported equipment as either being lost or stolen.

Some information is held by the House of Commons.

Information for the period 1 May 2022 to 31 October 2022 is held in full.

Information for the period 1 January 2022 to 31 April 2022 is only held in part however, and I hope the following is helpful in explaining why this is. To report an item as lost or stolen, passholders log an incident report with the Parliamentary Digital Service (PDS) and an incident ticket is then stored in our database. Previously, the House was able to run a report on all tickets and extract the relevant data depending on the criteria inputted. As of May 2022, PDS has changed their database and reporting tools, and now there is only a limited functionality to be able run reports on historic incident tickets. After several attempts at creating a report we have been able to identify some information relevant to your request, however our reporting tools are no longer able to extract this in full. The information we do hold for this period has been provided in the attached also.

Additionally, please note that the names of the Members have been withheld in accordance with section 40(2) FOIA. This is because we have concluded that the disclosure of this information 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.

Please also note the following points about this data:
• Items may have been lost or stolen from anywhere on the parliamentary estate (House of Lords and/or House of Commons) or elsewhere.
• It is the responsibility of the individual to report items lost or stolen and it is not possible to record how reliably this is done, especially for smaller or less valuable items.
• Lost or stolen IT equipment is reported separately to both the Police and PDS both of whom publish the resulting data. Since the loss or theft of equipment may be reported to one or both entities, a definitive list of said cannot be extracted by viewing this data either together or in isolation.
• Parliamentary supplied IT equipment can be procured from PDS either through a loan allowance or through the IPSA credit card. For further information please visit the IPSA website.
• Please also note that the “Date of Incident” column in the attached refers to the date the incident occurred on, as opposed to the date it was reported to the House.

Lastly, it may also help you to know that we also currently proactively publish an anonymised publication of lost and stolen IT equipment on an annual basis, and data on this for the periods 2019 to 2021 can be found on our webpages