Sir Ian warns islands face significant challenges

He urged the community to come together to ensure its future.

Sir Ian, who leaves the island next week after six years as Lt-Governor, said the Bailiwick’s skill base had been eroded and was under more pressure than ever before, constrained by its size and dealing with the fallout from Brexit and the pandemic.

‘These things have meant that the ability to pull the right skills to this island has been challenged and I think the skills drain has the potential to get potentially quite acute, quite quickly.’

He said the size of Guernsey, and the Bailiwick as a whole, made the challenges faced by all of western Europe that much more acute. ‘We don’t have the reserve of skills and I think we have some quite unique challenges because, in many ways, we are generally a wealthy and successful place.

‘The cost of living here is extremely high and there are some very significant affordability challenges for those who are perhaps not necessarily directly involved in the financial industries, and those wealthy occupations that support it, so I think that is going to be quite a challenge for the island.’

He urged the Bailiwick’s community to find the time to have a continuous debate about where the opportunities are and what sort of society it wants to be.

‘We need to be horizon scanning – that means looking out from the islands, not into the islands, and then doing something about it. It is not an easy thing to do, but that is how this place is going to survive – by recognising those opportunities and going for them.’

He said the Bailiwick, and Guernsey in particular, needed to make time and capacity for that continuous conversation and he acknowledged those conversations were happening, but not collectively.

‘Understandably, people are too busy with their day-to-day lives, looking at trying to fix this problem and that problem, trying to find more housing, trying to fix the pandemic.

‘Somehow or other we’ve got to, as a community, just find time with the right people, across politics, business, third sector and the community at large, to have this continuous debate about where the opportunities are and what sort of society we want to be.’

He said it was not a problem unique to Guernsey and it took time to put a choreographed process in place.

‘Long-term strategic thinking is really difficult but I just think, for a small place like this, if the winds shift, we can suddenly find that something that our prosperity is predicated on evaporates quite quickly.

‘Whatever happens in the world, these islands will be resourceful, and imaginative in the way they respond, but that’s not to say there aren’t some significant challenges coming down on us.’

In-depth farewell interview with Sir Ian in today's Guernsey Press