A promise to publish the information every six months was made in 2016 after the JEP exclusively revealed that two civil servants had spent £13,000 of taxpayers’ money on fully flexible business-class flights to South Africa.
The pair travelled to Cape Town to attend a mining conference. They justified the expense by saying that they were to begin working immediately after landing and therefore needed to be well rested.
However, following further questions from this newspaper, it transpired that they had originally planned to play in a golf tournament, something that they cancelled after realising they would arrive too late. They instead started work when they attended a conference – eight hours later.
Data should have been published for the second half of 2019 but the government said the Covid-19 pandemic – which did not affect the Island until March – had prevented this as civil servants were redeployed to deal with the crisis. Figures for the first half of 2020 should also have been published by now.
It is not the first time the government has failed to publish the data on time. In February 2019, Senator Sarah Ferguson, then chairwoman of the Public Accounts Committee, criticised the government after the JEP discovered that flight data up to December 2017 was the latest to have been published.
Responding to questions from the JEP about why it had not published figures for the second half of 2019, a government spokesperson said: ‘The Government of Jersey has agreed and put arrangements in place to publish its staff travel expenses on a six-monthly basis. During the collation of data for the second half of 2019, the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and resources were prioritised to initiatives which protect Islanders and the economy.
‘We are currently in the process of finalising data collation covering the period from July 2019 to June 2020. We expect to publish the data in the week commencing 2 November 2020.’
According to the most recent details published for the first half of 2019, one civil servant spent £4,365.12 on British Airways business-class flights to the Cayman Islands to attend a conference.
