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Legal advice and Consultants (2022)

Request

  1. Please give me the total costs of legal advice sought by Lindsay Hoyle during his tenure as Speaker, with a breakdown of all costs, the dates billed and the purpose for which advice was sought.
  2. Along with this figure could you please tell me the total expenditure during Hoyle's tenure on all such external consultants, their names, dates and services too?

 

Response

1) Please give me the total costs of legal advice sought by Lindsay Hoyle during his tenure as Speaker, with a breakdown of all costs, the dates billed and the purpose for which advice was sought.

Some information is held by the House of Commons. The Office of the Speaker’s Counsel (OSC) is the internal team which provides legal advice to Mr Speaker. However, the OSC also provides legal advice to other House teams such as Committees, departments and the Clerk of the House. We do not disaggregate costs to provide advice to the various areas of the House, so we do not hold specific cost details for the OSC’s legal advice to the Speaker.

However, we do hold information about external legal advice to the Speaker of the House of Commons. Since November 2019, the total cost of external legal advice to the Speaker is £4,195 inc VAT.

2) Along with this figure could you please tell me the total expenditure during Hoyle's tenure on all such external consultants, their names, dates and services too?

We have interpreted your request to mean the total expenditure for any other external consultancy sought by Sir Lindsay Hoyle during his tenure as Speaker of the House.

This information is not held by the House of Commons. Barring the legal costs provided to you in our response to Q1, we hold no other costs relating to external consultancy provided to Sir Lindsay during his tenure as Speaker.