Bulletin, 22 September 2022 (new publication date, December pay, dependants, payment cards)

After the historic events of the past two weeks, we are writing to let you know of some new dates for the publication of business cost information and other news that may be useful to know.

Please note our phone lines will be closed on 7 October for staff training.

This week's bulletin contains information on:

• Business costs publication: 17 November 2022

• December pay

• Updating your registered dependants

• Changes to how payment card lines are repaid

Business costs publication: 17 November 2022

The publication of business costs data due last week was postponed.

The new date will be 17 November 2022, when we will publish all claims, paid, repaid and unpaid, processed in the period from February to July 2022.

This publication brings us back in line with our normal schedule for data publication following the security review we carried out earlier this year.

Following security advice, we made changes in two areas to minimise risks: we removed ‘to/from’ and ‘details’ from taxi claims and removed ‘details’ from venue hire and surgery claims.

We will continue to redact information from other types of claims in line with the normal approach, whether to remove a security risk or prevent personal information from being disclosed.

On the same date in November we plan to publish annual data for the financial year 2021-22. We will share this data with each MP in an email due to be sent later today. This is to ensure you have time to review the data before it’s published.

Please note the deadlines for raising questions about the data and for making any outstanding repayments.

If you have any queries, please contact us.

December pay

In the summer we asked you for your views about when you would prefer to be paid in December.

There were 496 responses from MPs and MPs' staff – 73% said they would prefer to be paid on the last working day of December and 27% wanted to be paid a week in advance.

As there is a clear majority in favour of the current arrangements, the pay date in December will continue to be on the last working day of the month.

Updating your registered dependants

The Accommodation Budget uplift will be removed at the end of the financial year in which an under-18 dependant turns 18. We will do this automatically and let you know we have done it.

However, if your situation changes before this or you are no longer the primary carer for a registered family dependant, please let us know so we can update your budgets.

Changes to how payment card lines are repaid

When reconciling your payment card transactions you have the option to mark a transaction as ‘not claimed, to be repaid’; this confirms to IPSA that you are choosing to repay this transaction to us.

This option should be used sparingly, as the payment card must only be used when making purchases related to your Parliamentary work. It is often used when you have lost a receipt or are awaiting a refund for the purchase. These transactions are not published, and we ask for them to be repaid within 30 days of the date you mark them ‘not claimed’.

This is set out in our Payment Card Policy and our Debt Policy.

From today, to improve the timely repayment of these lines, we will review all payment card lines marked ‘not claimed’ that are more than 30 days old.

Those lines not awaiting a refund from a supplier will be moved into salary deductions.

This means that you don’t need to take any action to repay these costs to IPSA, they will be automatically deducted from your next salary.

We will contact you before we make arrangements to deduct costs from your salary, to give you the chance to repay the costs directly or to tell us about any other issues.

If the value of the transaction is more than £200, you will be able to split the cost over an appropriate number of months.

Please remember that when you mark a line ‘not claimed, to be repaid’, you are instructing us that you will repay the cost.

We will then take action if the cost is not repaid to IPSA within 30 days from the date you mark the line ‘not claimed’.