Open recruitment exemptions (FOI)

Request

I would like to know the number of times an Exemption to Open Recruitment has been approved for any Government of Jersey (GOJ) roles each year, from 2015 to 2021 inclusive, broken down by department, whether the role is permanent, and by grade of the role it relates to.

If it is also possible, a final column splitting the information by broad rationale for the Exemption would also be very helpful. Thank you.

Response

Exemptions are allocated on an individual basis and therefore any details of an exemption are recorded on an individual’s personnel file or on the recruitment system as appropriate.

The Government of Jersey does not hold a central record of exemptions to open recruitment. To provide an answer to your request would require a manual review and manipulation of data. A Scheduled Public Authority (SPA) is not required to manipulate and create new data sets, but to provide the requester with information the SPA holds, as specifically requested. Therefore, the information is not held as per Article 3 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011.

In any event, and in the alternative, it is estimated that the cost of extracting the data would exceed the time limit as prescribed under Regulation and therefore Article 16 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) law applies.

Articles applied

Article 3 - Meaning of “information held by a public authority”

For the purposes of this Law, information is held by a public authority if –

(a) it is held by the authority, otherwise than on behalf of another person; or

(b) it is held by another person on behalf of the authority.

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.