The lack of progress on one of Home Affairs’ priorities for the States term was blamed on an explosion of formal written questions sent to the committee which have taken up vast amounts of staff time.
‘The progression of the police complaints review has stalled completely because the official who is supposed to be conducting that review has to react to all these questions which keep coming in and all these subject access requests which keep coming in,’ said Home Affairs president Marc Leadbeater.
At present, police complaints are limited to alleged misconduct. Home Affairs has already agreed that in future complaints should also be permitted into services carried out by the police and how the force is directed, and Deputy Leadbeater has said he would like reforms to go even further than that.
But such changes would require new legislation following the review which has now stalled.
Deputy Leadbeater claimed that Home Affairs would have asked for more staff if it had known how many questions and demands for information it was going to face from deputies and members of the public.
He described it as ‘a massive problem’ facing his committee.
‘We have a very small team in our office – single figures,’ he said.
‘We now have one official working full-time on subject access requests – one member of staff taken out all the time. We have other officers dealing with freedom of information requests, and Rule 11 and Rule 14 questions [from States members], and other enquiries that come in.
‘It has really hamstrung us this term. It’s absolutely bizarre and we didn’t anticipate this volume at the start of the term.
‘If we had known the volume, we would have asked for an extra two or three resources. We need two or three people dedicated to responding to these questions.’
He had previously indicated frustration about the redirection of staff time away from the committee’s policy priorities and was asked by Jayne Ozanne to provide more detail about the impact it was having on his committee.
It was revealed last week that written questions from deputies to States committees had more than doubled in the past two years.
In that time, Policy & Resources handled by far the highest number of questions, answering more than 350.
Home Affairs has responded to 111, the third highest among all committees.
Committees do not publish the number of questions received under the States’ freedom of information regime or the amount of time taken responding to subject access requests made under data protection laws.
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