Guernsey Press

OPINION: Guernsey – warts and all

Forget all the hype about Guernsey. You need to be tough to survive here – and have an employer who can shield you from some of the worst cost-of-living pressures. Richard Digard looks at a revealing analysis of the island’s problems

Published
St John's Church. (32044905)

GREAT place, Guernsey. To live, I mean. Well, that said, you’ll probably need a greater degree of emotional and spiritual resilience than might be necessary in England and the cost of living is so high you’ll need a big pay rise to even contemplate coming here.

How big? Actually 22% – in your case that’s around an extra £6,000, so let’s call that £35,000 a year. Going to the doctor’s a crippler too. So we’ll throw in private health insurance for you and the family and that’ll cover the arm-and-a-leg cost of an ambulance too, should you ever need one.

Education for the kids? That can be excellent, if you can afford to send them to one of the three independent colleges. As, in fact, happens to 30% of island youngsters compared to just 6% in the UK, which is telling you something.

And since you’ll expect holidays and trips to see family and friends off-island, we’d better throw in subsidised travel for you, the missus and nippers as the cost of that’s pretty criminal too – not least because Guernsey isn’t served by budget airlines.

This alarmingly frank assessment of the deficiencies of the island isn’t mine, by the way. It’s the advice that was made available for anyone looking to be appointed as Vicar of St John’s Church and Chaplain of Guernsey Prison (closing date yesterday) and I mention it for several reasons.

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, St John’s just outside St Peter Port sounds like a terrific and vibrant parish, but it is up against it. The 1838 blue granite church isn’t funded by ratepayers, but by congregation members and an average of just 32 attend Sunday service every week. A further snapshot is provided by the pastoral offices and statistics for last year – Weddings 0, Baptisms 1 (6 in 2021), Funerals 13.

As the parish says, ‘We might not quite know what the future looks like but we are ready for a challenge,’ and I wish them well in that. Not least because of St John’s mission statement: To meet people at their point of need, with God’s love and hope. Well, I’m not a believer, but drop the G word and I’m on board, and I’m sure you are too.

My second reason for raising this is because whoever is lucky enough to join the parish and take on responsibility for the newly merged (to save money) Prison Chaplaincy gets lovely, newly renovated accommodation with an extensive and easily managed garden.

In essence, without this rather compelling support package of extra money, health insurance, travel grants and free housing from the Church, Guernsey is somewhere that people of modest means are better off swerving. That means you, too, Mr and Mrs Local. And that’s before you’re walloped with GST.

As the Dean of Guernsey, the Very Rev. Tim Barker, puts it in his preamble to the appointment, ‘Guernsey is a good place in which to live and minister for anyone who comes with their eyes open and with good emotional and spiritual resilience.’

This is revealing, but I wonder how many of our elected States members will ask him what exactly he meant by that and why he said it?

Guernsey’s deficiencies are now so many and so obvious – other than to our political leaders – that employers have to try to work around them to get the staff they need. Even when it comes to vicars.

Look at the denizens of Frossard House and the States Assembly and do you genuinely get the sense they’re there to meet people at their point of need, with love and hope? Charitably, I suppose, those desperately in need of help do get it. But the rest…?

Mostly now, however, you sense it’s the hope that has gone from people’s lives, along with any confidence that government has a clue what it’s doing – or recognises what it needs to do.

The review by Policy & Resources of the capital portfolio – that’s the list of projects the States has which, if all completed, will lead to a financial deficit – is a case in point. One category is the ‘do but review scope and/or solution’. That’s @govgg speak for ‘we can probably do it better or cheaper but couldn’t be arsed to check before as it’s only your money’.

The other aspect is the collapse of Garenne Group/RG Falla, Guernsey’s biggest building and construction group in circumstances that has caused the liquidators, at least, to ask some interesting questions.

The particular point here is that building costs were already going through the roof, causing Education to pull its schools project, and losing your biggest builder certainly isn’t going to help on the value-for-money front when everyone else is up to their ears in work.

To explain, nearly 20 years ago, and just before another construction blow-up that centred on a clinical block extension at the Princess Elizabeth Hospital, the island’s construction industry was staring into the abyss. Building boom was followed by bust because the States wasn’t managing its capital portfolio properly (sound familiar?), was crashing ahead with schemes when builders were already busy, and triggering something called tender price inflation. Again, sound familiar?

Then Commerce and Employment civil servant and economist John Ogier and some politicians came up with a robust economic model which predicted the impact of different workloads on tender price changes with a view to ironing out peaks and troughs and ensuring better value for taxpayers. Trying to manage finite resources, if you will.

For whatever reason, however, then C&E minister Carla McNulty Bauer and colleagues never really adopted it and so after decades of limited public investment in infrastructure, the construction sector has wound down and now faces a glut of work it can’t handle – around £460m. if it was all to go ahead.

That’s also impacted the building of affordable housing and raises the prospect of importing construction firms when we have no accommodation and limited tourist beds. This is not a sensible place to be and should have been avoidable by a government keeping a watching brief on the economy.

Instead, there’s a pent-up demand of 40 projects in no particular priority order or even graded by benefit provided (spending millions on Alderney’s runway to save a few quid outranks work on Guernsey’s airstrip that experts say would boost the whole economy) that the island can’t pay for without tax increases and which local builders can’t deliver anyway.

As the Dean of Guernsey implies in his assessment of the island, if you don’t acknowledge the problems you face you have no possibility of resolving them. But we don’t listen to him, either.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

SOME of the figures I used here the other day about pensions were challenged by Retired States Employees’ Association president Sean McManus and, unfortunately, he was right to do so. The average occupational pension paid to former States employees was £11,772.66 in 2020 (4,645 pensioners receiving £54,684,000pa). The £40,686.27 figure I quoted in error was the pensionable salaries of current active scheme members (5,304 individuals paid £215,800,000 a year). Apologies for misreading the tables and for any confusion caused.