‘It should have just been a couple of presses of some buttons’
A DEPUTY has defended taking up more than 80 hours of civil servants’ time to work out what a States committee had spent on flights and accommodation over the past four years.
Policy & Resources was unhappy that so much time had to be spent answering Christopher Le Tissier’s Rule 14 questions, which revealed that P&R was unsurprisingly the biggest spender, accounting for £90,000 of expenditure totalling £115,000 across all committees.
Deputy Le Tissier said yesterday that the time required to answer his questions raised concerns about States accounting systems.
‘Transparency costs. It should have just been a couple of presses of some buttons,’ he said.
‘There should be a presumption that such information should be made public unless there are good reasons not to.’
Although Deputy Le Tissier called on all committees to publish their travel costs annually from now on, he said he had no strong views about whether the £115,000 spent since October 2020 was too much or not enough.
He was, however, critical of what he called the ‘lowlight’ of P&R external relations lead Jonathan Le Tocq, Environment & Infrastructure president Deputy Lindsay De Sausmarez and officials travelling to the COP28 climate conference in Dubai last December, at a cost of more than £12,000.
‘It’s hypocritical of E&I to want us to use cars less and then go on a trip to Dubai which generates more than 7,000 tons of CO2,’ said Deputy Le Tissier.
But Deputy Le Tocq insisted the Dubai trip was necessary because the conference discussed the Paris Agreement on climate change, which was relevant to Guernsey, adding that the States had decided against sending a delegation to this year’s conference in Azerbaijan.
Deputy Le Tocq described P&R’s average annual spend of just over £20,000 as ‘pretty good value for money’.
‘Personally, I would rather not travel as much, but sometimes it is unavoidable,’ he said.
‘I remember one other occasion when we were negotiating a tax agreement with Qatar around Covid and I requested to sign it in London, but Qatar insisted that I fly out to Doha for two days.
‘You can’t always get what you want.’
Deputy Le Tissier was disappointed that he was unable to obtain more details of expenses incurred by the Guernsey branch of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.
He claimed its travel costs during the past four years were more than £50,000.
‘Because the CPA is not a committee of the States, it did not need to comply with my request in the same way that States committees did, so as a result it refused to say who had gone on what trips and to where,’ he said.
