Expenses by States employees (FOI)

​​Request

Amounts claimed in expenses by States employees for each year, broken down into departments, from 2010 onwards including as up to date figures for 2015 as possible.

- Expense claims for employees only.
- Could you include any expenses for working lunches, meals and entertainment.
- Could you include any travel expenses claimed for travelling on courses, conferences or meetings on or off-Island, using flights, taxis, trains or buses.

Response

All scheduled public authorities (SPAs) are separate legal entities for the purposes of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011. 

Therefore, if a request comes in via the States of Jersey central FOI unit it will be disseminated to the most relevant SPAs that are central States of Jersey entities. 

In respect of this request, the Treasury and Resources department (T&R) are the scheduled public authority who will provide the co-ordinated response to this request.

It has been necessary for each department’s finance team to provide the information which is available to their department. 

Due to the level of detail which has been requested, it has not been possible for departments to respond within the resource limits allowed by the legislation. 

States departments do not record information at the level which is requested it would therefore be necessary to examine thousands of transactions. This breakdown is being refused under Article 16 Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011. See below.

Refusal applied to this request:

Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011
Part 2
Access to information held by a scheduled public 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 the 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.

(3) Regulations may provide that, in such circumstances as the regulations prescribe, if two or more requests for information are made to a scheduled public authority-

(a) by one person; or
(b) be different persons who appear to the scheduled public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign, the estimated cost of complying with any of the requests is to be taken to be the estimated total cost of complying with all of them.

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.