Procedure and House Affairs committee  We don't hold meetings in public. Our board meetings are private, but we do publish the minutes of those meetings. We don't routinely publish board papers, but under our freedom of information act people can ask to see them and then we will make a judgment about whether it's in the public interest to release those papers.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, there is. It is quite a complex process. It works in a number of stages. First, if we say we won't publish information, for whatever reason, the requester can ask for an internal review that has to be carried out by a senior member of IPSA who wasn't involved in the original request.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  There haven't been many, but there's one in process at the moment. In fact, it's a very interesting one. It relates to one of my previous answers, which had to do with somebody requesting to see some receipts. We said no. The internal review agreed not to show them. So the requester went to the information commissioner, who said yes.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think it's taken at least a year and a half.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think the current board in particular is very keen to do things by consensus. It's been in place for nearly a year now and as the director I go to all the board meetings. It doesn't come down to a vote if there's a good argument. Directors coming from quite different backgrounds can have different views on matters.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Apart from highly sensitive security-related claims and claims having to do with disability, where we just provide an aggregate figure once a year for all MPs, we basically publish everything. The way we do it is that we extract the relevant information from those claims and report that.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think it's fair to say there was resistance at the beginning. It's a very different relationship, when you've got an independent regulator, from when it's done in-house. And although Parliament obviously did vote for our creation, I think there were a good number of MPs who weren't really that happy that we existed.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  In our first year, quite quickly, we had the value-for-money review by the National Audit Office. Now, this is most unusual for an organization of our size in its first year, but obviously given the political sensitivities of what we do, there was a lot of interest in that. The National Audit Office, if I recall—I'm afraid I don't recall all the detail now—gave us a pretty good report, and we were very pleased with that.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I can, yes.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Well, we have a board, which is enshrined in legislation, with five members. The chairman is Sir Ian Kennedy. We have an ex-High Court judge—this is required by statute—Sir Neil Butterfield; an auditor, Anne Whitaker. An ex-MP, Tony Wright, a well-known MP, was the ex-chair of the public administration committee, amongst other things.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It is, yes. It's audited by the National Audit Office and we are also often scrutinized by parliamentary committees. Our budget has to be agreed by a special committee, which is the Speaker's Committee for IPSA, again chaired by the Speaker, obviously, and that comprises MPs from various parties and some lay members as well.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Chairman, I'm very pleased to be asked to appear before the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs today. At IPSA we're very proud of what we've achieved over the past four years and I'm glad to have the opportunity to share some of our experiences with you. As you know, IPSA was created by the Parliamentary Standards Act in 2009 in response to the MPs' expenses scandal in 2008.