Amount of Covid-19 isolation benefit claims (FOI)

Request

Can you please provide us with the amount of isolation benefits claimed in Jersey between March 2020 and December 2020 - broken down by month and by reasons for claiming. For example, was the benefit claimed by:

• someone who tested positive and had to self-isolate

• by direct contacts who had to self-isolate

• by family members of someone who tested positive

Response

Up until the 2 June 2020 the detailed reason for claiming was not captured.

A breakdown of both the monetary value and the number of claims is attached in the following PDF documents:

Data table - Isolation Benefit paid  

Data table - Number of claims

Individuals in receipt of Income Support and who also claiming isolation benefit, are not included in these figures as the isolation benefit is paid through their Income Support Claim. To confirm the exact number of these would require us to undertake a significant extraction of data which would take more than 12.5 hours to complete therefore as Article 16 of Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 has been applied to this subsection of the data.

Article applied

Article 16 - Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011

(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.