Broken Links in the Chains of Command

According to the Citizen's Advice Bureau, the Prison Governor is "Steven Guy-Gibbens who reports to the Minister for Home Affairs"; actually he resigned last year; their site is not up to date. But it suggests he reported directly to the Minister, Wendy Kinnard.

The story from the JEP was that he resigned because of frustration with red tape.

What was clear in an interview he gave was that he had no direct access to the Minister for Home Affairs, Wendy Kinnard, and that his requests for better facilities, more staff and notes of problems with morale and over-crowding - were filtered through the Home Affairs chain of command - and never reached the Minister at all.

Given that this obstruction is very recent, and the resignation only took place last year, it makes one wonder at the way in which Chief Officers "insulate" their Ministers, and - with regard to Haut De La Garenne, and other possible cases of abuse - Blanchepierre, Greenfields.

How likely it was that a Minister - or back then a President of a States Committee - would have been to know what was going on back in the 1960s or 1970s?

I think there are good grounds for supposing that they could have been easily "insulated" from finding out what was happening, and the case of the Prison Governor - in a quite different area - shows how easily this can happen even today!

Note also that he says the bureaucracy was even more strifling than anything in England!!

http://www.thisisjersey.com/news/showarchive.pl?ArticleID=001932&year=

FRUSTRATION over too much bureaucracy in the Island led to La Moye prison governor Steve Guy-Gibbens' surprise resignation this week. In a thinly veiled attack on senior civil service figures, he says he had expected a challenge when he took on the post in 2004, but not such a negative attitude from people outside the prison with whom he was expected to work. Mr
Guy-Gibbens, said that the frustration had proved too much. He said: 'It is the bureaucracy which is so frustrating. Everything takes so long, and in my view that is not a very efficient way of operating. There are so many tiers of administration every step of the way'. Mr Guy-Gibbens worked for the Prison Service of England and Wales for 29 years, the last five at the Prison Service headquarters in Westminster - which he had believed was the height of civil service bureaucracy. 'That was nothing like I have come up against here,' he said. 'I was hoping, in vain, that someone may think we ought to be doing things slightly differently, but that did not happen.'

Published 14/07/2007