Income Support rental payments (FOI)

Request

A

During 2016, approximately £10m of tax payers money was paid to landlords for rent for people who work but can’t afford their rent. This amount has I understand risen to £26m in 2018.

Can you please advise the amount of tax payers money spent on paying these rents for each year since 2000 until and including 2018?

B

Please advise the top 30 individuals or company landlords who benefited for each year since 2000.

"So ultimately I want to know the top 30 (total for each individual year the highest amount of value of rent received of tax payers money) landlord who benefited of the tax payers money each year and how much they benefited. If it is a company I would like to know the directors/ultimate beneficiaries named along with the company and the total amount of tax payers money received for that year. Each year for the 18 years I am only interested in top 30 highest in each year. It would be good to highlight also if any of them at any time were in government in a political decision making role or politician in the states assembly and able to vote or married to someone in government who can vote or relation of someone in government who can vote.

Example of what I would like to see in attempt to make it clear:

in 2000

Highest earner Mr A £50k in 2000, minister

2nd biggest earner B Ltd £40k in 2000 director are A, B and C (Deputy of Grouville)

3rd biggest earner Mrs D £35k Chief Minister

Etc etc etc

2001

Highest earner Mr F £70k in 2001

2nd highest earner Mr G £65k Senator

30th highest earner Mr H £60k

2002

Highest earner Mr J £90k Previous Chief Minister"

Response

The role of Customer and Local Services in administering the Income Support scheme is to ensure that all eligible households receive the correct amount of benefit support they are entitled to. The housing component, which includes rental costs, is one of a number of different components under the Income Support scheme that can make up a household’s overall entitlement.

Where an Income Support household is living in rented accommodation the name of the landlord and the amount of rent being charged is recorded on each claim as part of the claim’s administration. These details are not however held in a computer searchable format.

Therefore in order to provide the requested information each separate Income Support claim would need to be manually checked. Due to the volume of claims in each of the separate years that are the subject of this request this would take more than 12.5 hours to answer either question A or B.

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.