Emergency body was not right option
NOW, what was so hard about that? Nobody has been hurt – despite an exercise in teeth-pulling that would make a dentist wince.
The full picture of how the island's emergency committee came to veto HSSD's bid to take over the ambulance contract is slowly becoming clearer as politicians and civil servants add layers of detail that should have been available from the start.
The sworn secrecy that left the deputy chief minister stumbling through interviews, terrified that he might reveal even the most innocuous detail, has gradually fallen away as the old HSSD board and Treasury look to write their own history of a deal gone wrong.
We now know, for example, with certainty that it was Treasury who called in the heavies from the Civil Contingencies Authority, fearing that HSSD could not get a safe ambulance service up and running within three months.
We know also that the penalty costs for failing to deliver that new HSSD ambulance contract were a mighty £275,000 a month.
But why has it taken so long to get to this point? It is, after all, public money at stake and public servants and politicians making the deal.
Suspicion naturally falls at this stage on that least transparent of bodies, the Crown Office, which habitually shies away from any form of public accountability and open disclosure.
It is for that reason that ministers should refrain in future from reaching for the nuclear button when confronted with tricky issues. If the CCA must be retained with such draconian secrecy clauses, it should be as a measure of last resort, when all else has failed, not to act as a fig leaf to cover the failure of time-sensitive negotiation.
Using an emergency body, wrapped in secrecy, is democracy in extremis, not a convenient method of banging the heads together of two stubborn parties.
It is vital that a safe and reliable ambulance service is maintained. But this was not the only way of achieving that.
A review would reinforce that message and expose the CCA as a sledgehammer used to crack a nut, but it would serve no greater purpose. For the moment, the States must learn to resist the urge to summon to CCA.
