Case files reviewed by the Law Officers’ Department (FOI)

Request

For the calendar years 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 2016 and broken down by the terms of office of the current AG and his predecessor.

A

How many road traffic offences case files do the Law Office Department receive from the police.

B

Of these, how many are not taken to court because there is no realistic prospect of conviction.

Response

A and B

This request was made to the Jersey Law Officers’ Department (LOD). The LOD are not a Scheduled Authority under the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 and therefore are not required to respond.

In the spirt of the law and in an effort to assist, the request was forwarded to the States of Jersey Police.

The police, however, are unable to respond in the time frame allowed to complete Freedom of Information requests. Requests for legal advice is not a ‘searchable action’ within our systems. To answer would require a manual investigation of each and every road traffic offence in the time frame requested. A total of 2788 incident files.

Police do not hold information relating to the AG.

Article applied

Article 16 A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.