By Sir Mark Boleat
IT is good news that the Economic Development Minister has committed to publishing an annual report detailing the way that more than £4 million of funding is being spent on Jersey’s cultural sector.
Four million is a lot of money, but it is small compared with the amounts spent on health and community services (£286 million this year), children, young people, education and skills (£206 million) and customer and local services (£107 million). So what does the government publish about this expenditure? The answer is very little.
The statistics and performance page of the government website has the following:
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On social security statistics, just some high level figures showing for example the number of individuals claiming benefit in 2019 and the number of claims paid in 2018.
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On education there are again high level figures up to 2021.
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On health, there are no figures at all on how money is spent.
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On transport there is a chart showing bus passenger numbers up to 2024, figures for the number of vehicles up to 2021 and figures on driving tests up to 2017. For sea and air transport the figures, with one exception, stop at 2021. Fuel imports figures stop at 2019.
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Impôt and customs receipts stop at 2019.
Ambulance, police and fire and rescue statistics stop at 2021.
Was it ever thus? No. On social security, for example, there is a comprehensive report with detailed statistics for 2017. Do the detailed statistics still exist? The answer is surely yes because the statistics are essential in order for policymakers and officials to do their job properly. I have no doubt that within what was the Social Security Department there are very detailed statistics in respect of all of the benefits and those receiving them. Similarly, there are detailed statistics on impôt and customs receipts, and these are published in the annual government plan.
It seems that a decision was taken simply to stop publishing detailed statistics. I just wonder if this is one of the drawbacks of having a Freedom of Information scheme, that is that it simply replaces the provision of information as a matter of course. If one wants detailed statistics one has to make an FoI request and wait up to 20 days to get a response, which often is unsatisfactory.
I will give an example. An FoI request was very simple: “Please advise how much stamp duty has been collected each year from 2013 to 2023.” The answer was that “The amount of stamp duty collected for each year is publicly available in the Annual Reports for the Court Service which are published on www.gov.je.” A link was duly given but each report only has figures for two years and they are deeply buried in a long statistical annex. Surely this information is readily available and could easily have been given?
The taxi service is an important public service in Jersey, but if one wants any information about it one has to make a FoI request, of which there have been a number.
An FoI response, dated 4 March 2024, stated that there were 272 taxi licences in issue and 363 drivers entitled to drive licensed vehicles. And, of the owners of the 220 vehicle licences held by individuals, 146 (66%) were 60 or over and 61 (28%) were 70 or over. A separate FoI request asked for a breakdown of the number of licensed drivers between men and women. The unhelpful answer was: “This information is not held in recorded form. To provide an answer to the request would require extraction and manipulation of data to produce new information. A Scheduled Public Authority is not required to manipulate and create new data sets.” Really? Clearly the data is held and it would take just a few minutes to provide the answer. And given a general commitment to equality surely this information should be published?
So far this year over 250 responses to FoI requests have been published and they contain much useful information, but which is not easily accessible. I suspect the cost of responding to individual FoI requests exceeds the cost of simply publishing data on the government website.
According to the government the data is actually published. The excellent Engagement and Information Improvement report published in 2022 had as one of its recommendations: “Statistics and data should be findable in a single location on gov.je”. A progress report, published in May 2023, stated that: “Work has progressed with the aim to have initial update (including link from front page) complete by end June.” That was June 2023. It has yet to happen.
So what is going on here? I doubt if there is a conspiracy to keep data secret. Rather there is a culture within large bits of government that making data publicly and easily available is not a priority. It should be.
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Sir Mark Boleat has held a number of leadership positions in companies, public bodies and charities in Jersey and in the UK. He is senior adviser to the Policy Centre Jersey.
