Covid-19 email correspondence (FOI)Covid-19 email correspondence (FOI)
Produced by the Freedom of Information officeAuthored by Government of Jersey and published on
14 May 2020.Prepared internally, no external costs.
Request
This Freedom of Information request aims to understand the Government's intent to actively place delays on open data regarding the severity and impact of the ongoing COVID-19 situation.
Please provide any email correspondence relating to "COVID-19" or "Coronavirus" and "data" or "figures" or "statistics" or "press release" or "statement", for the period of 14 March 2020 to present from the following mailboxes (searching both 'Sent' items and 'Inbox' and other related folders):
Deputy Richard Renouf
Ben Perron
Dirk Danino-Forsyth
Laura Perez
Christian May
Response
Searches were undertaken for the period 14 March 2020 to 26 March 2020 (date of receipt of the request).
The searches were undertaken on the email accounts of the above-named individuals, using the search terms provided, except for “statement”. As the standard footer of gov.je emails references the Government privacy statement, it was considered this might affect the results with false hits.
Deputy Renouf’s account returned 116 results within the above parameters – these were reviewed and were not deemed to be relevant to the request.
The accounts of the other named individuals returned the following number of emails;
The emails from the accounts of Laura Perez and Christian May were extracted, however the files total 825 pages and 1262 pages respectively.
It is considered that to review the emails and to ascertain whether they were relevant to the request, would far exceed the time allocated to responding to Freedom of Information responses.
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.
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