Bulletin, 22 February (data publication, boundary changes, Year-end, electronic signatures)

Date published: 22 February 2024

Welcome back after recess.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is holding an online webinar on 'constituency casework data and dissolution' for MP staff, on Thursday 7 March, 2-3pm.

Register your interest and contact events@ico.org.uk if you have any questions.

This week’s bulletin contains information about:

  • MPs’ business costs publication – 14 March

  • Boundary changes

  • Year-end 2023-24

  • Electronic signatures for job descriptions and contract generators

Our phone lines will be closed on Friday 8 March for training. If you have an urgent query that day, please email us and use the word ‘urgent’ in the subject line. Our normal phone service will resume on Monday 11 March.

MPs’ business costs publication – 14 March

We are due to publish details of MPs’ business costs for October and November 2023 on Thursday 14 March 2024, as part of our routine bi-monthly publication of data.

We publish these costs to provide members of the public with transparency over how public money is spent.

You can access the latest data on your business costs now using the publication preview service.

We would strongly advise you to check your data before it is published so that you can plan ahead and contact us with any questions or concerns.

Boundary changes

We recognise that some offices will be impacted by constituency boundary changes after the next election.

To ensure that IPSA is providing the right level of support to help offices through these changes, the IPSA Board has agreed on measures that relate to constituency office and accommodation moves, as well as additional commuting costs and redundancy.

For more information, visit Boundary changes.

Year-end 2023-24

With year-end approaching, we’d like to remind you that we are running two live year-end webinars over the next few weeks to support and guide you through this process:

  • Monday 26 February – 11am

  • Tuesday 12 March – 2pm

To register for the year-end webinar, visit our Eventbrite page.

We have also published a recorded version of the webinar which explains the important things to action, and deadlines.

Watch the Year-end 2023-24 webinar.

Electronic signatures for job descriptions and contract generators

IPSA's Payroll team has been working to make the process of generating job descriptions and contracts for MP Staff more efficient.

This work was based on your valuable feedback on the difficulties you faced when emailing large documents to us. Further to your feedback on the first iteration of the improved process, we will continue to refine our solution before launching.

We will be in touch soon to ask for your participation, and before we launch. Thank you for all the feedback received to date.