EDUCATION minister Martin Ozanne has apologised for misleading the public. He had previously claimed the department had not had enough time to respond to Scrutiny Committee enquiries about complaints procedures.

But Deputy Ozanne has now admitted he was wrong.

‘I’m not going to argue about it. I think I may have given the wrong impression to everybody,’ he said.

‘If in any way I have misled the public, I apologise. That certainly wasn’t my intention. However, it could be construed as not putting the whole facts forward.’

Deputy Ozanne had claimed that Education was given only two weeks to respond to a Scrutiny letter asking about the department’s procedures.

The original query was in fact sent out in May, giving Education five months to respond.

Deputy Ozanne admitted that he knew about the letter but had not taken it seriously enough at the time.

‘It was originally dealt with at staff level, but I’m fairly clear now that I was informed of the need to respond but I must not have taken note of the urgency,’ he said.

‘It is our intention to cooperate with all the States departments, but we have a huge workload and at times things are not responded to as quickly as they should be.

‘I mentioned that at the July States meetings and apologised for it then.’

It has been a difficult period for Education, with the department fending off calls for resignations and accusations of wasting taxpayers’ money.

Scrutiny has accused it of correspondence failures over a number of matters, not just complaints procedures.

Deputy Ozanne said he would work hard to resolve Scrutiny’s frustrations.

‘I don’t think this is typical of the Education Department – we are all under a lot of pressure and unfortunately some things take longer,’ he said.

‘We have so much that we have to deal with the whole time and it’s a job to take it all in. This is something that obviously slipped through the net and I apologise for that.

‘We all have to hold up our hands from time to time when we are wrong and I am not afraid of doing that.’