How are MPs’ staff funded?
The vast majority of MPs’ staff are funded through the IPSA staffing allowance, although they can be funded through other means and some are employed using Short Money.
The staffing allowance each MP can use to claim for staffing salaries and other related costs is set by IPSA each year, and is occasionally reassessed to take in MPs’ need for support. The current allowance is designed to cover up to five FTE staff, and since 2012 has been weighted for London-based constituency MPs to cover higher living costs in the capital.
The 2024-25 allowance is set at £268,550 for London area MPs and £250,820 for non-London area MPs.
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A list of London area constituencies can be found in Schedule 1 of the scheme, the allowance is laid out in Annex A, assets.ctfassets.net/nc7h1cs4q6ic/5j9dlpZsDtyFgqi43bBB91/7eaea5bcc329496878b420bf2e511586/Seventeenth_edition_of_the_Scheme_2024-25.pdf
MPs can use some of their IPSA staffing allowance or office costs to subscribe to ‘pooled services’, whereby MPs, usually from within the same political party, combine a proportion of their staffing allowances to jointly fund specialist research support staff. Examples of this include Labour’s Parliamentary Research Service and the Conservatives’ Policy Research Unit.