Volume of housing complaints (FOI)

Request

On Tuesday 9 February 2021, the Environment Minister told the States Assembly that ‘over the past twelve months, the number of complaints about housing issues has dramatically increased’.

A

Please provide figures showing the number of complaints about housing issues for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020.

B

Please also specify the nature of the complaint, the type of tenure to which it relates, and what action, if any, was taken in response to the complaint.

Response

A

The number of housing related complaints received by the Environmental Health team for each year broken down into Minimum Standards and Tenancy Related is as follows:

Environmental Health also receive a number of informal enquiries where immediate advice is given over the phone and clients do not wish to take the matter any further. These are not recorded in the figures above.

B

We do not record the type of tenure.

Complaints can result in a variety of actions being taken, depending on the seriousness of the complaint. We do not store the actions taken in an easily retrievable format. To obtain this information an officer would have to review case files, emails, notes and so on. for each case individually for the past three years.

This would take considerably longer than the 12.5 hours allowed for us to respond to requests and therefore this information is exempt under Article 16 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011.

Exemptions 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.