Legally, it's a lot of blue sky to go at
A PROMISE by the Legislation Select Committee chairman to use some 'blue-sky thinking' about its future development is welcome and overdue. The ever increasing torrent of laws and regulations coming out of St James's Chambers highlights the need for effective scrutiny of the whole process.
A PROMISE by the Legislation Select Committee chairman to use some 'blue-sky thinking' about its future development is welcome and overdue. The ever increasing torrent of laws and regulations coming out of St James's Chambers highlights the need for effective scrutiny of the whole process.
While that might be the job of the States, members generally gloss over the minutiae of the legislation because it is not an area for non-specialists, which means potentially controversial or damaging matters such as section 67 of the new tax laws simply get nodded through.
HM Procureur's office frequently triggers the most significant pieces of legislation and he will have drafted the reasoning behind it that appears in the Billet d'Etat, as well as the law itself.
As legal adviser to the States of Guernsey - although not accountable to its members - the Policy Council generally accepts what is put in front of ministers by St James's Chambers and recommends the States to endorse it.
Although the Legislation Select Committee sounds grand, its mandated task is simply to ensure that any law does what the Procureur has said it should. There is no effective external, independent or expert review of any proposed law and no challenge to its scope or purpose.
If there were, the debacle over the island's fisheries legislation might have been avoided, as would the section 67 own goal.
The need for some rigour in the process is reinforced by HM Procureur's other role - that of prosecutor. Having instigated and drafted the law, St James's Chambers also interprets it and decides whether someone has broken it and if they should be prosecuted. It is a remarkable concentration of responsibility - some would say power - in one individual and not a situation the States would contemplate were the same structure being put in place from scratch today.
These are all areas the committee should consider, as is a more effective consultative process before laws are enacted.
In recent years the trend has been to pay lip service to the concerns of practitioners or impose too narrow a timescale for discussions.
The committee truly has a lot of blue sky to contemplate.
