Households and individuals receiving benefits over £20,000 and £50,000

​Request 808497679

Please provide the number of households and the number of individuals currently receiving total annual benefits with a value exceeding £20,000, and those exceeding £50,000. 

For this request, ‘benefits’ should include: 

•all monetary benefits (e.g., Income Support, pensions, allowances, supplements, and anyother cash-based support), and

•all non-monetary benefits that have an assessed or assigned monetary value (e.g., health,care, housing, or other in-kind support where a financial value is recorded or used forinternal accounting).

For clarity, the valuation of non-monetary benefits should reflect the monetary value used internally for budgeting, accounting, or cost-allocation purposes (e.g., housing subsidies, care packages, health-related support, or other in-kind services). 

Please provide the figures for the most recent full year for which data is available. 

If the information is not already held in aggregated form, please provide the underlying counts or totals in whatever form they are held, as permitted under the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011. 

A UK think-tank analysis found that a workless family with three children could receive a benefits package worth around £46,000 a year, giving them the same disposable income as a UK worker earning roughly £71,000–£72,000. BBC Radio 4’s More or Less reviewed the claim and confirmed it was possible under specific assumptions, though not typical. The point of this question is to better understand the level of support we are giving in Jersey, especially as Social Security is often criticised for not doing enough.

Response

ESSH does not hold a single record showing the total annual value of all benefits received by each individual or household. This information is held across multiple separate systems, and no combined dataset exists.

Under the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011, public authorities are not required to create, manipulate, or compile new information in order to answer a request. Producing a total figure for each individual or household would require ESSH to create new information.

Therefore, Article 3 applies.

To compile the information you have requested, ESSH would need to manually identify, calculate, and combine benefit values for each person. The work required has been reviewed and would exceed the maximum cost limit set by the Law. Therefore, Article 16 applies.

Articles applied:

Article 3- meaning of information held

Meaning of “information held by a public authority”

For the purposes of this Law, information is held by a public authority if –

(a) it is held by the authority, otherwise than on behalf of another person; or

(b) it is held by another person on behalf of the authority.

Access to information held by a scheduled public Authority

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.[4]

(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) by 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.​