FOI 40-22: MLAs and declarations under sections of the determination

Information Standards Freedom of Information Response

Our Ref: FOI 40-22

26 September 2022

Freedom of Information Act 2000 (“FOIA”)

I am writing to confirm that the Northern Ireland Assembly Commission (Assembly Commission) has processed your request dated 26 August 2022 in line with the Freedom of Information Act 2000. In your request, you asked:

“Please disclose the following for the period since May 2022:

1. The names of the MLAs who have made declarations under section 9 of the determination, "payments to associated persons".

2. The names of the MLAs who have made declarations under section 35 of the determination, "employment of associated persons”

A number of administrative processes have been agreed and established where Members must make a declaration for the purposes of recovering all expenses or any support staff costs. These declarations ask Members to declare if the payment is to an associated person or not. If the response is an affirmative one then the nature of the association must be detailed. Having made an affirmative declaration, there is no limit on the recovery of costs for an associated person or persons. 

In relation to the declarations made for payments to associated persons under paragraphs 9 and 35 of the Assembly Members (Salaries and Expenses) Determination (Northern Ireland) 2016 (as amended), the Assembly Commission has completed a review of its records and found that the dataset requested is held only in its raw form. 

For the purpose of section 11(5) of the FOIA, a “dataset” means information comprising a collection of information held in electronic form where all or most of the information in the collection—

(a) has been obtained or recorded for the purpose of providing a public authority with information in connection with the provision of a service by the authority or the carrying out of any other function of the authority,

(b) is factual information which—

(i) is not the product of analysis or interpretation other than calculation, and

(ii) is not an official statistic; and

(c) remains presented in a way that has not been organised, adapted or otherwise materially altered since it was obtained or recorded.

The Assembly Commission anticipates that the dataset would require material alteration, reorganisation and adaptation in order to comply with this request.

Furthermore, the FOIA does not require the creation of datasets for publication, nor does it require datasets to be updated if they would not otherwise have been updated as part of our statutory function.

As all claims for the recovery of expenditure and all instructions for the processing of payroll payments are accompanied by these declarations, it is possible to you with the lists of MLAs who made the declarations during the period of time requested.  This list has not been provided at this time as it would not differentiate between those MLAs who made an affirmative declaration and those who made a negative declaration.

You have the right to request a formal review by the Assembly Commission and if you wish to do so, please write to me at the above address. If after such an internal review you are still unhappy with the response, you may appeal to the Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF which will undertake an independent review.

The Assembly Commission may publish details of your FOI request and its official response within the organisational disclosure log. The request will be completely anonymised and you will not be identified in any way. This is to meet the requirements as laid out by in the agreed publication scheme with the Information Commissioners’ Office.

Yours sincerely

INFORMATION STANDARDS