Payment terms in relation to construction and building maintenance contracts (FOI)

​​Request

I should like to request the following information relating to payment terms with your suppliers

A.

Over the last twelve months, what is the average time (in days) taken to make payments to Tier 1 contractors for construction and building maintenance contracts, following the receipt of an undisputed invoice or payment notice?

B.

For construction and building maintenance contracts established since 1 March 2015, are you, or will you be putting in place monitoring and reporting whether your main contractors are paying their subcontractors within 30 days?

C.

For new construction and building maintenance contracts established since 1 March 2015, are you or will you be taking steps to ensure that within 30 days payment is applied along your Tier 1 suppliers’ supply chain?

D.

For construction and building maintenance contracts since 1 March 2015, have you built in a contractual requirement for your suppliers to pay the suppliers directly below them in the supply chain within 30 days (or are you taking steps to apply this)? 

E.

To what extent do you use PAS 91 as the prequalification standard for your construction and building maintenance contracts?

F.

If you answered the previous question ‘NO’, are you considering using PAS 91 (substantially) in the future for new construction and building maintenance contracts?

Response

A.

This data is not held on a single system and would require the collation of data from various systems for circa 15,000 invoices. 

These invoices would need to be sorted to extract the ‘Tier 1’ contractor invoices to determine the number of invoices in scope. 

These invoices would then need to be identified in manual receipting systems to provide an individual receipt date and payment information extracted from the financial information system. 

The two datasets would need to be integrated to determine a time in days for each invoice payment and, hence, an average time to make payments. 

This would exceed 12.5 hours to compile. It is therefore being refused Article 16 Freedom of Information Law 2011 (see below).

B.

We do not routinely monitor main contractor payments to sub contractors.

C.

We do not intend to take steps to introduce a monitoring system.

D.

We do not intend to build in a requirement for payment to flow down the supply chain as a matter of routine.

E.

Elements of the PAS91 requirements are embodied within the organisations in house prequalification process.

F.

Not applicable.

Exemption(s)

FOI exemption(s) applies:
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.

Justification for exemption(s)

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.