Ownership of [Property name and street redacted], St Helier (FOI)

Request

A

Who is the owner of [Property Name and Street redacted], St Helier please?

B

Is it occupied at present and if not how long it has been vacant?

Response

A

The requested information is absolutely exempt under Article 23 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011, as the information is accessible to the applicant by other means.

The information is available from the Public Registry as described on their public web page below.

Public Registry services, fees and Stamp Duty (gov.je)

B

Information regarding occupancy of a particular property is the personal data of the owner or occupier of that property and is therefore absolutely exempt under Article 25 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011. While not relating to current occupancy, statistics used in preparing the recent Action On Vacant Properties report came from the 2020 census and Article 8(6) of Statistics and Census (Jersey) Law 2018 states “The data from the census may be disseminated only in a form that does not enable the identification of any individual, household or body.”; so the law explicitly forbids us providing that 2020 data about a specific property. The November 2022 report linked from the above page - Action on vacant properties - contains a full discussion on currently available data on vacant properties.

Action On Vacant Properties report published (gov.je)

Statistics and Census (Jersey) Law 2018 (jerseylaw.je)

Action on vacant properties.pdf (gov.je)

Articles applied

Article 23 - Information accessible to applicant by other means

(1) Information is absolutely exempt information if it is reasonably available to the applicant, otherwise than under this Law, whether or not free of charge.

(2) A scheduled public authority that refuses an application for information on this ground must make reasonable efforts to inform the applicant where the applicant may obtain the information.

Article 25 - Personal information

(1) Information is absolutely exempt information if it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018.

(2) Information is absolutely exempt information if –

(a) it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is not the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018; and

(b) its supply to a member of the public would contravene any of the data protection principles, as defined in that Law.

3)      In determining for the purposes of this Article whether the lawfulness principle in Article 8(1)(a) of the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018 would be contravened by the disclosure of information, paragraph 5(1) of Schedule 2 to that Law (legitimate interests) is to be read as if sub-paragraph (b) (which disapplies the provision where the controller is a public authority) were omitted.