Passports (FOI)

​Request

A

How many passports and what kind were issued in 2015?

B

What proportion of the above is the British/Jersey passport with the Islander stamp (Jersey born, parents and grandparents too and not resided in the UK for five years).

Response

A

Passports issued in 2015: 10,628 passports were issued by the Jersey Passport Office in 2015; these passports were ‘Jersey variant’ British passports.

B

This question is not able to be answered as the effort involved would exceed cost limits. Currently, more than 12.5 hours of effort spent to retrieve the relevant information exceeds this limit.

Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011
Part 2
Access to Information Held By A Scheduled Public Authority

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.

(2)     Despite paragraph (1), a scheduled public authority may still supply the information requested on payment to it of a fee determined by the authority in the manner prescribed by Regulations for the purposes of this Article.

In this case, the reason for this is that passport application forms are currently paper-based and, on presentation to the Customs & Immigration Passport Office, are uploaded into the appropriate IT system. Passports and any required Islander status endorsements are generated based on the information provided on the form.

To establish the proportion of passports with the relevant endorsement would entail manually reviewing each scanned application form and cross-referencing to each issued passport.

Estimating five minutes effort per application with passport, this would equate to approximately 850 hours of effort.