Income Support claimants without children (FOI)

Initial Request

Can you please tell me the number of people, without children, that are working full time and are receiving income support?

Response

To answer the question, we need to clarify the phrase ‘working full-time’.

The Income Support (Jersey) Law 2007 defines full time as working 35 hours per week.

Adults claiming Income Support must satisfy tests relating to employment, residence and income and assets to qualify for the benefit. The employment test is that Income Support is only available to adults who are working full time or are exempt from this condition. Some working age Income Support claimants receive a partial exemption and are working less than 35 hours per week but this is considered sufficient to satisfy this test.

We do not hold the data in the format which would answer the question directly, however we are able to say that on 16 October 2017, there were 438 people receiving Income Support who are meeting the work condition and who do not have children on their claim.

Additional Request

Following receipt of your initial response, please can you confirm the number of individuals that qualify for a "partial exemption" out of the 438 number provided?

Could you also please clarify what you mean by the statement "The department does not hold the data in the format which would answer the question directly". Does that mean the figure provided is not accurate?

Response

Of those 438 people, 399 were working 35 hours or more.

39 people were working less than 35 hours but they fully satisfy our working requirements - these are the individuals who qualify for a partial exemption.

To explain how we hold our data; while we now capture the number of hours worked per week whenever a change is made to a claim, that wasn’t always the case so we cannot rely on this data to provide an accurate account of the working hours for all claimants.

We do hold consistent data on the work requirements of each adult. We have therefore used this data to identify the 438 adults who are categorised as working and having no requirement to seek extra hours. By using a combination of hours worked per week (where this is recorded) and other data available we have identified 39 of the total who are not required to work full time but have no outstanding work requirement.