The study, from Bridgehead Communications and its new Deputy Scorecard AI tool, examined all 718 FoI requests made to the States since 2014 and all 438 written questions put to committee presidents by deputies under Rule 14 over the same period.
According to the analysis, 323 of the 718 requests (45%) missed that 20-day target, with the average response taking 40 calendar days. And only 367, or 51%, were granted in full – the rest were partly refused, refused outright, or met with a response that the information was not held.
Performance also appears to be getting worse. The States answered 88% of requests on time in 2016 and 84% in 2017, but in each of the last three full years – 2023, 2024 and 2025 – the figure has been under 40%.
The slowest committee by some distance was the Committee for Home Affairs, which since 2021 has taken an average of 59.5 working days to answer, with only 30% of its requests answered on time.
The research was prompted by Deputy Rob Curgenven, who contacted Will Walter, founder and managing director of Bridgehead Communications.
‘These findings don’t surprise me, least of all which committee comes out worst on response time. I’ve been pushing for openness, transparency and accountability from government long before I stood for office. It’s a big part of why I stood in the first place,’ said Deputy Curgenven.
‘A voluntary code with no legal force and no reliable record of its own performance isn’t transparency, it’s the appearance of it. And a response isn’t the same as an answer – nearly half of these requests came back only partly answered, refused, or met with “information not held”.
‘A reply in the system isn’t accountability if it doesn’t tell you anything. This has to change.’
Mr Walter said that the voluntary code the States operates, rather than a Freedom of Information law, was not working in its current form.
Guernsey has no statutory freedom of information law – unlike Jersey, which has had one since 2011 – and instead operates a voluntary Code of Practice that asks departments to respond within 20 working days but attaches no penalty when they do not.
‘Answers are slow, they are late, and too often they simply do not come,’ Mr Walter said.
‘There is a scene in the very first episode of Yes Minister, back in 1980, where Sir Humphrey Appleby reveals that the government’s own White Paper on Open Government has itself been marked confidential. 46 years on, Guernsey isn’t quite that good a joke. But it isn’t far off.
‘Some of what gets refused outright is entirely mundane, and nobody would mistake it for Sir Humphrey guarding a state secret. But none of this needs a Sir Humphrey scheming away in every department.’
He said that his website, powered by artificial intelligence, would now be a check on whether the voluntary code holds.
The research on responses to formal written questions under Rule 14 found that only 12% of 438 questions asked since 2014 carried a distinct response date at all – most of them in the past 18 months. On that basis, response times looked reasonable, with 80% within the 15-day target to respond and 100% within the extendable 30-day cap.
Of the four committees answering sufficient questions to be ranked, the Policy & Resources Committee had the weakest performance, missing the 15-day target 30% of the time.
You need to be logged in to comment.