Employment trust offered 'stabilisation funding'

A Jersey charity has been offered "stabilisation funding" after staff were told jobs were at risk due to a dispute over government support.

The Jersey Employment Trust (JET) had said was reviewing its services after ministers said it would no longer receive additional grants above its agreed budget.

Deputy Lyndsay Feltham, Minister for Social Security, said she had not cut base funding to the trust and would not consider doing so.

The trust's board said it continued to support the minister in identifying "a sustainable, long-term funding solution" and it had sought further clarification from her over funding.

Feltham said cutting base funding would go against everything she believed in and would contradict her disability inclusion agenda.

She said in 2025 she had been able to offer a one-off top-up grant to the trust of £785,000 - on top of its £1.9m baseline funding - due to the underspends in the departmental budget.

"I made it clear to JET that it was just fortuitous that I was able to offer this and that we could not guarantee it on further occasions, because underspends will always vary," she said.

Feltham said she had secured more funding for disability and inclusion initiatives in the 2026 budget.

She said her intention was to use the money "to make meaningful progress on the delivery of priority areas agreed by the Disability and Inclusion Advisory Group" and had not intended to use it for an additional top-up for JET but she would provide "stabilisation funding".

She added she wanted ensure co-ordinated service provision between the trust and various agencies.

"A key part of this work would involve a data-sharing agreement so we could understand the scale of support provided by JET to its clients, and what other support each of them was receiving, which would ensure we could provide the best co-ordinated approach across all appropriate agencies," she said.

"This would have put us in the best position to develop a business case which, if necessary, I could submit to Treasury for extra funding for an enhanced baseline funding budget for them (with future-proofing safeguards included).

"Unfortunately, despite ongoing dialogue, this work was not completed during the year, in large part because the JET Board did not come to an agreement with us to share data."

The trust's board said as part of a "co-operative approach" it had, for a number of years, shared all information it was legally permitted to provide about the clients it supported.

Current data protection legislation prevented the sharing of clients' personal data, a position of which the department was fully aware, the board said.

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