Long Term Care claimants (FOI)

Request

A

How many individuals were claiming Long Term Care benefit each year for the past five years? If possible, please also provide a breakdown of how many claiming at each level of care.

B

The average wait from initially contacting SPOR to receiving first payments from the LTC fund and the longest wait in the past five years from initially contact to getting first LTC payments.

Response

A

The below link is to the open-source data that shows how many people were claiming Long Term Care (LTC) across 2014 to 2018 (the 2019 data will be available at the same location before the end of March 2020):

Open source data - LTC demographics

The data regarding care levels is not available given the variation in care level over time, ie someone may be Level one for a period and then be re-assessed at another level during the period.

B

Regarding the time between initial SPOR contact and the receipt of the first payments, this is exempt under the time restrictions of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014, as the data to supply this information is held across a number of platforms and the time to reconcile the requested information would exceed 12.5 working hours.

Articles applied

Article 23 Information accessible to applicant by other means

(1) Information is absolutely exempt information if it is reasonably available to the applicant, otherwise than under this Law, whether or not free of charge.

(2) A scheduled public authority that refuses an application for information on this ground must make reasonable efforts to inform the applicant where the applicant may obtain it.

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.