Overseas travel (FOI)

Request

Please provide information on all overseas trips by staff members from of the Chief Minister's department since the beginning of 2016. Please include flight and hotel details and costs, as well as duration of trip and reason for trip.

Please also include class of travel.

Response

Please find below a link to the recommendations adopted by the States of Jersey in relation to the pro-active publication of all travel expenses over £500. Within this link there is also access to the 2014 and 2015 travel expense data.

Review of travel policy and recommendations for improvement

The adoption of the travel recommendations occurred in June 2016 and while the States of Jersey made a commitment to pro-actively publish all travel expenses over £500 from that date it did not apply the process retrospectively (ie January to June 2016).

Please find below a link to the Gov.je Open Data site which provides access to sets of data published by the States of Jersey. Further to the recommendations referenced above, travel information for the periods June to December 2016 and January to June 2017 are available on Open Data.

Cost of travel over £500

Travel cost information for the period July to December 2017 is currently being collated by the various States of Jersey departments and will be available on Open Data in due course.

Providing information of all travel costs (ie including travel under £500) would not be possible under the time and cost limits of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011.

Exemptions applied

Article 23 Information accessible to applicant by other means

(1) Information is absolutely exempt information if it is reasonably available to the applicant, otherwise than under this Law, whether or not free of charge.

(2) A scheduled public authority that refuses an application for information on this ground must make reasonable efforts to inform the applicant where the applicant may obtain the information.

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.