Government of Jersey

Strike related annual leave requests (FOI)

Produced by the Freedom of Information office
Authored by Government of Jersey and published on 14 June 2019.
Prepared internally, no external costs.

Request

How many members of staff in each government department and States funded bodies have had to take annual leave or unpaid leave because of industrial action by teachers on these dates:

Monday, 14 January
Tuesday, 19 March
Tuesday, 26 March
Wednesday, 1 May
Tuesday, 7 May
Wednesday, 8 May
Wednesday, 15 May
Thursday, 16 May
Tuesday, 21 May
Wednesday, 22 May
Thursday, 23 May

Response

There is no obligation under the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 (the Law) to create information to respond to a request for information. While in this instance some staff were requested to provide the details, in practise it has not proved possible to collect the information completely or fully accurately. This is due to the fact that the Government of Jersey has a very large number of employees and employees are under no obligation to advise the reason for annual leave requests. Where a reason is recorded, this is at the employees’ discretion and entered into a free-form text box. Any such recorded information is not then collated centrally.

In order to review, verify and collate the recorded information and information collected, and to liaise with all departments to identify any missing data, would far exceed the time frame allowed for responses, being 12.5 hours, as detailed within the Law.

Although a number of schools had to close as a result of strike action, all other Government departments have been able to maintain services.

Information in relation to staff leave of States funded bodies will not be held by the Government of Jersey.

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.