The former treasury lead has become the first candidate to declare that he will stand for the presidency of the Policy & Resources Committee if he is re-elected as a deputy in the general election on 18 June.
In an article in Good Friday’s Guernsey Press, Deputy Helyar said he wanted to ‘galvanise and inspire’ the next Assembly to achieve ‘a fundamental reset’ under which politicians would take back control from officials and provide stronger leadership over the States.
‘Most of our authority is delegated and we are kept remote from actual decision making, while being simultaneously buried in unnecessarily long and often pointless policy documents, complex processes, tenuous legal issues and tedious debate, topped off with a constant barrage from the media and social media,’ he said.
‘If we stand back from this and look at what is really going on, politicians are not driving the bus of public services. We are to a large extent simply looking out of the window while being driven somewhere many of us do not want to go and the public also never asked to be taken.
‘Given our parlous financial circumstances, politicians must become leaders in substance as well as form if they are to be held responsible and accountable to the public. We must be driving the bus.’
Deputy Helyar said the kind of reforms he had in mind were necessary to improve the public’s trust in the States and stem growth in the size of the public sector.
The island’s laws and the States’ rules of procedure give the Assembly and its committees, made up mostly of deputies, extensive powers over almost all activities carried out by government, but in recent decades there has been a gradual trend of politicians choosing to delegate more day-to-day decisions to officials, partly to free up their time to deal with more strategic and policy work.
Some members of the States have become increasingly frustrated when criticised for so-called operational decisions they did not make and in some cases were unaware of until informed by the media or the public.
Deputy Helyar recently cited the example of a plan to remove the diving platform at the Bathing Pools which prompted a public demonstration. Members of the Education, Sport & Culture Committee claimed earlier this week that they had nothing to do with the contentious relocation of Education Office staff to the sixth form centre. And the States Trading Supervisory Board revealed yesterday that it had no prior knowledge of a controversial decision by officials to ban pigeon racing.
‘Very contentious things can be done at the moment without any political awareness because of the concept of delegated authority, sometimes granted decades before, where public servants act independently in the name of their committee,’ said Deputy Helyar.
He was widely expected to leave politics at the end of this term, after 18 months without a committee seat following the removal of the P&R on which he sat for the first three years of the term, but he recently announced that he had decided to seek re-election.
He was first elected in 2020, finishing fourth in the island-wide poll, the highest-placed first-time candidate, as the leader of the now defunct Guernsey Party.
His chances of being elected P&R president have been boosted by the impending retirements of several senior politicians, including the current P&R president, Deputy Lyndon Trott, and his vice-president, Deputy Heidi Soulsby.
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