Out of Island income support payments (FOI)

​Request

Apart from States contributory old age pensions - "a parent or parents of children or a working spouse or partner working and living in Jersey" - are any kind of benefits within Income Support paid out of Island to these people? If so please can they be identified and the cost of each.

Response

Entitlement to income support requires the residency conditions in the legislation to be satisfied and for a person to also be ordinarily resident in Jersey.

However, the legislation does allow for people to be reasonably absent for short periods, or longer periods where there are exceptional reasons depending on the component type. This is usually related to absence for medical treatment or education for young people with a disability.

Further information relating to the residency conditions and also absences from Jersey for each component of income support are contained in the Income Support Policy Guidelines (Sections 2.2, 5.6, 5.7, 5.9, 6.5 and 6.6) which can be accessed below. 

Claiming Income Support

It is not possible to provide the cost details for each type of situation where payment has continued during an absence from Jersey as this cannot be completed within the 12.5 hour time frame and so would exceed the £500 cost limit.

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.