Carl Meerveld blamed a lack of transparency from the civil service as one of the leading causes of the 'black hole' in States finances and for pushing the GST agenda on islanders.
‘I found myself very unpopular in 2016 when I was first elected by saying Guernsey is run by the civil service and deputies are an inconvenience. Ten years later and I wouldn’t mind if they were doing a great job, but they’re not,’ he said.
‘The civil service very much wants GST and has done for two decades. 5% GST would only raise £50m. We need £100m. It was already written in the plans that it wasn’t going to be 5%, it would be 10% in the near future.’
Mr Meerveld said that after the 2012 election, first-time deputies elected themselves as presidents of committees with no political experience.
‘They were completely out of their depth and I’m told that the civil service had to step over the line, go beyond just being civil servants, they started influencing and designing policy and they haven’t gone back into the box since.
‘I wouldn’t be so concerned if it was working. But the people who ran all the projects that lost of hundreds of millions and have been doing it for decades is the civil service. The senior leadership who will be running the next project and who will do it all over again is the civil service. ‘
He accused the civil service of concealing information, like Health & Social Care staff withholding a £5m. overspend on the patients records project for five months, before it was made public.
‘One of the things people don’t realise about the relationship between deputies and the civil service, it isn’t like directors in a company and staff. There is a clear line we are never meant to cross,’ said Mr Meerveld.
‘The civil service do operations and implementation and the deputies set policy. We’re not allowed to get involved in operations. We shouldn’t even question it.
‘Civil servants don’t want us looking behind the curtain, they control the information that is provided. They don’t want you to do and meet or talk to anybody unless a civil servant is with you taking notes.’
He claimed that civil servants acted as a filter, only giving out the information they wanted to, and that no deputy involvement was wanted on projects.
Mr Meerveld said that deputies were left to take the blame, while the same senior management team of civil servants continued to run future projects.
‘One catchprase always used that I’ve come to hate is “lessons have been learned”. In business it doesn’t matter, if you’re middle management or a managing director, you mess up badly enough and you’re fired,’ he said.
‘If you want true accountability, people need to be fired and new people brought in.’
Many projects ‘deliver only a fraction of what was promised’
Too many States projects deliver only a fraction of what was promised, former deputy Carl Meerveld has claimed.
He told Sunday’s public meeting on GST that he had been told the real cost of the electronic patients record system, already some £5m. over budget, was probably closer to £30m.
‘The original cost was £17-20m. The cost to date is £22m. That doesn’t sound too bad, except I’ve had people who worked on it tell me the real cost is probably nearer to £30m.,’ said the outspoken former deputy.
‘They also told me it’s only delivering 10% of what it was meant to. We’re paying £22m. for just a fraction of what we were supposed to get.’
He said that as a politician he saw this regularly on States projects, where the specification changed and what was delivered was ‘only a shadow of what is originally planned’.
He included hospital modernisation, digital projects at the Revenue Service, and the flawed MyGov project within the same scope. He also claimed that a lot of money paid to former IT contractor Agilisys was wasted due to ‘mismanaged projects and huge disruption’.
Mr Meerveld also claimed that when he was elected in 2016, the Revenue Service was running on a 1970s mainframe computer programmed in a dead language with no real back-up.
‘If it went wrong, we weren’t going to be able to collect any taxes.’