States Members’ email traffic (FOI)

Request

Please could you provide the total number of emails received in the inbox and the total sent in the outbox of each States Member by year for 2019 and 2020?

Response

Individual States members are not covered by the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011. States Members do not have any obligations under the Law in an individual capacity, and are not listed as a scheduled public authority.

In respect of Members who are also Ministers, to answer the request would need a review of all emails to see whether they related to their Ministerial roles or their constituency roles.

To do this, the data would need to be extracted and manipulated. Aside from taking more than the prescribed 12.5 hours to do the work, the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 does not require a Scheduled Public Authority to manipulate data in order to provide a response.

Article 16 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 has therefore been applied.

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.