THERE’S a temptation at this time in the electoral cycle to start columns like this with, “here’s another question to put to candidates standing in the election.” Carry on like that for too long, and the questions soon crowd out the answers.
But perhaps this one is an exception to the rule, given that it finds its origins before some of the candidates standing for office this year were even born, so it would at least have an argument for jumping to the front of the queue.
The question of whether they would support the creation of a public sector ombudsman stems from the Clothier report of December 2000, and since then has perhaps been repeatedly kicked further into the long grass than other proposal in recent history. And that’s where it has lain, through the dying embers of the old committee system, and then through no less than seven Councils of Ministers. The number of fine political minds who have quietly and carefully plotted a course around it in that time can’t be far off the number of complaints the only similar panel we do actually have, received in 2025 (142).
Of course it hasn’t been lying undisturbed, which in some ways is even worse. It has been picked at, pulled, poked and prodded, before being championed, analysed, rejected and then re-examined once again – all leading to the position we now have, which is not materially much different from the one the late Sir Cecil and his panel lamented more than a generation ago.
In the history of Jersey’s public administration, it is a story to rival Jarndyce Vs Jarndyce.
We might undertstand if this perfect specimen of bureaucratic snakes and ladders created a chilling effect on the existing Complaints Panel, which in the absence of any other system, has simply just got on with the job being asked of it, under constant threat of being disbanded, and intense criticism from Ministers to the extent of refusing to engage with it.
As they note in their recent report for 2025, since the States agreed to an Ombudsman in 2018, they have having spent the last eight years patiently awaiting their imminent demise – which just never seems to actually come, and their view is that the most recent report on it all still has not broken the deadlock.
It is to the immense credit of these volunteers that they have continued with their important work throughout that period, and if past history is anything to go by, they will still be doing it when the ballot boxes are opened once again in 2030.
