IN A 1995 Guernsey Court of Appeal judgement, Sir Godfray Le Quesne observed that the island’s Housing Laws are ‘formidable enactments’ that placed great and unusual powers into the hands of the Housing Department.

He went on to say: ‘We wish to emphasise, however, that such drastic power calls for meticulous care in its exercise and scrupulous balancing of the conflicting interests which it affects.’

More recently, in 2009, the Deputy Bailiff held that the department’s failure to give someone who had lived here for more than seven years a proper explanation of why her licence application had been refused, requiring her to leave the island, in part demonstrated a lack of meticulous care.

On Thursday, the Deputy Bailiff held at a judicial review hearing that because the Parole Review Committee had not provided a prisoner with sufficient detail of why his application for early release was refused that it should be reconsidered.

He also went further. In noting that it has been the practice that the head of the PRC filed an affidavit in reply to an application for judicial review, the court held that it could not be a substitute for a proper letter to the prisoner setting out the decision and the reason for it.

In other words, the review panel could not expect to take important decisions affecting individuals and then justify them at a later stage.

It is a significant and welcome restatement of an earlier matter in which the court said that reasons for decisions made should be sufficient to enable applicants to appreciate that the relevant matters have been considered so they can understand why they have failed.

In many respects, this is the court reinforcing the steps being taken by government to improve corporate governance. One of the six principles set out by the Independent Commission on Good Governance in Public Services includes taking informed, transparent decisions.

Another is engaging stakeholders and making accountability real and it is encouraging that the Royal Court is extending that concept through these judgements.

The days when committees or departments could make arbitrary decisions are thankfully long gone.