Jersey · Information Freedom & Transparency · 2017–Dec 2024
Jersey’s right to information is a law. It still can’t say how fast an answer comes.
The Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 is a statute, not a code of practice - unlike Guernsey’s voluntary Code (see Guernsey’s own version of this page), a late or refused Jersey response can be legally challenged, not just criticised. But Jersey’s own disclosure log records only when a response was published, never when the request was received, so no honest turnaround figure - the centrepiece of Guernsey’s page - can be built for Jersey from anything the Government publishes.
- Statutory deadline under the 2011 Law
- 20 working daysStatutory deadline under the 2011 Law
- Jersey's FOI law, vs Guernsey's voluntary Code
- StatutoryJersey's FOI law, vs Guernsey's voluntary Code
- Last month in the published request-volume series
- Dec 2024Last month in the published request-volume series
- Published response-time figure for an individual request
- NonePublished response-time figure for an individual request
The Law itself is public: Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 sets a 20-working-day statutory deadline (extendable in defined circumstances) for a public authority to respond, with a right of complaint to the Information Commissioner and, beyond that, appeal to the Royal Court - a different order of accountability from Guernsey’s Code, which is a published target with no legal force behind it. What that statute buys Jersey requesters cannot currently be measured from anything the Government of Jersey publishes: see the section below for exactly what was checked and why each source closes the door on a turnaround figure.
What can be shown
Requests received, by month
Every month in the Government of Jersey's own open-data feed, Jan 2017 to Dec 2024 - a volume count, not a response-time series.
This series stops at Dec 2024 because that is the most recent month published on gov.je’s own request-volume export as of this page’s last research pass - not a truncation on this page’s part. A separate, older copy of the same resource, cached inside opendata.gov.je’s CKAN catalogue rather than read from its live source, was never refreshed after its initial import and is frozen five years earlier still, at Nov 2019 - this page reads from the live export, not that stale catalogue entry.
Requests, 2017–2024
7,846
Average per month
82
Busiest month (Jun 2021)
139
Quietest month (Dec 2019)
40
Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011; Government of Jersey, FOI disclosure log; opendata.gov.je, Freedom of Information data and statistics; Government of Jersey, FOI statistics (live Power BI dashboard). The Government of Jersey publishes this count as one of four monthly-aggregate resources under “Freedom of Information data and statistics” (received volume, department, requester type, topic) - none of the four carries a response date, an outcome, or any other per-request field, so none of them can be turned into a turnaround figure no matter how the numbers are cut.
What can't be shown, and why
Why there's no response-time chart
Guernsey's version of this page leads with mean and median response time, by year and by committee. Jersey's can't - not because the research wasn't done, but because the figure doesn't exist to find.
The disclosure log
Every entry on gov.je’s public FOI disclosure log carries a “Date Published” field for the response - and nothing else dated. No receipt, submission, or request date appears anywhere on an individual record, so there is no second timestamp to measure a turnaround against, for any request, at any point in the log’s history.
The open-data feed
The four resources published under “Freedom of Information data and statistics” are monthly aggregate counts only - requests received, by department, by requester type, by topic. None carries a response-time or outcome field at any level of aggregation, so there is nothing in this feed to derive a turnaround figure from even in principle.
The live stats page
gov.je’s own FOI Statistics page has moved on from a downloadable file to an embedded Power BI report, covering volume, department, topic and requester type - the same four cuts as the open-data feed, in dashboard form rather than a spreadsheet. An interactive report, not a dataset, and on the categories it does show, still no response-time measure.
Put together, that is three independent places the Government of Jersey publishes FOI activity - the disclosure log, the open-data feed, and the live stats dashboard - and none of the three records the one date a turnaround figure needs: when the request arrived. That is a genuine gap in what Jersey chooses to publish, not a research shortfall on this page’s part, and it is worth stating as plainly as the figure itself would have been shown, had it existed.
Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011; Government of Jersey, FOI disclosure log; opendata.gov.je, Freedom of Information data and statistics; Government of Jersey, FOI statistics (live Power BI dashboard).