I've had this problem before, it's a symptom of management not trusting development teams.

It's worse when combined with the "we say estimates aren't timeframes but secretly they are" problem: give a 3 day estimate for something, and when it's not finished in 3 calendar days (because only around 1/4 of that time was actually usable for work, the rest was pointless meetings or 20 minute gaps where nothing useful can be done), more meetings are scheduled to discuss why the estimates are "wrong".