Ministerial Decisions

1240/5(8374)

WRITTEN QUESTION TO THE MINISTER FOR TREASURY AND RESOURCES BY SENATOR S.C. FERGUSON

ANSWER TO BE TABLED ON TUESDAY 17th JUNE 2014

Question

Given that there are 13 Ministerial decisions for 2014 for the Treasury and 6 for Property Holdings which have not been listed on the gov.je website, would the Minister provide a list, including titles of these decisions and the reason for their exemption from publication?

Answer

When a draft Ministerial Decision is prepared in Treasury and Resources it is first loaded onto the Livelink system where it is reviewed for appropriateness by officers at the States Greffe. At this stage it is allocated an MD number. The States Greffe process includes the approval (or otherwise) of a proposal that a decision is considered to be exempt from publication under the Code of Practice on Access to Information held by the States, Committees of the States and Departments of the States. Not every decision that is loaded in this way progresses to full signature by the Minister. This may be, for example, because an alternative course of action may have been identified. Furthermore, a draft decision loaded onto the system may be complex and may take some time to progress to formal signing by the Minister. It may, therefore, appear chronologically after earlier numbers. Numbers which appear to be "missing" may, in fact, be simply pending signature. It is therefore not accurate to assume that any Ministerial Decision numbers listed on the gov.je website equate to signed, exempt decisions.

Ministerial  Decisions  that  have  been  approved  as  "exempt"  by  the  States Greffe  are  exempt  from publication for a valid reason. This means that publication of the Decision Summary Title in itself could be undesirable, for example where negotiations relating to specific properties are still ongoing. However, to be helpful, information has been provided below where it has been possible to do so.

The following Ministerial Decisions are missing' from the sequential listing on the gov.je website. A full listing has been provided as it was not possible to reconcile to the number of decisions mentioned in the Senator's question. The tables below set out those decisions and where applicable, the reasons for exemption. "Number not used" includes both decisions which did not progress to formal signature and those pending formal signature.

Some detail has been withheld to protect the exemption criteria.

The number of exempt decisions should be placed in the overall context of the number of decisions processed. The percentage is small and the presumption is always toward publication unless exemption is essential.

Treasury

Property Holdings