‘I know that expenditure reduction is incredibly and rightly disliked by the community, and for that reason it’s also incredibly disliked by politicians, but I think we have to be honest enough to say, even if we’re not going to recommend any significant expenditure reductions, we have to be able to justify why not,’ said Deputy Lindsay de Sausmarez.
‘So we have to actually look there. And it has meant a lot of very uncomfortable conversations. But we need to have a really honest assessment which looks at finding a balance between revenue-raising and expenditure reductions.’
The P&R president admitted that any such cuts to services would be heavily resisted, however she said that pursuing efficiencies in the public sector would continue to be progressed, with efforts made to cut public spending by £17m. over the course of the next year.
She said that her committee was still to finalise its recommendations but she hoped it would be able to present a united front with its final report, due out early next month.
‘We need as realistic a picture of the current situation as possible and how it’s likely to change and then we can make political judgments on how best to meet that challenge,’ she said.
Deputy de Sausmarez, speaking on the latest Guernsey Press Politics Podcast, said that she hoped her political colleagues would not be looking to dodge the issue for another day.
‘The States has got a fabulous track record in can-kicking. Putting something off for another day has become a comfort blanket,’ she said.
‘We owe it to the community to give a degree of certainty about what’s going to happen.’
The P&R president may well present the report herself in the States if P&R’s current treasury lead, Deputy Gavin St Pier, is not returned to the committee once the States votes next week on a replacement following his resignation. She has never supported GST in a States vote, but said that she has voted for other revenue-raising measures.
‘I’m not afraid of a challenge,’ she said. ‘Some have said it may be better me coming from a non-expert position, looking as a member of the community who understands that times are tough, and people are really feeling the pinch. We really get that. And a lot of this is not about avoiding impacts – they are unavoidable – but about where in our judgment do we think those impacts would be most fairly distributed, taking different pressures into account.’
This week P&R’s corporate tax sub-committee’s report was published, which revealed that corporate tax experts favoured the GST-plus model and believed that corporate tax changes it would recommend were only likely to raise about £3m. a year. Deputy de Sausmarez said that the sub-committee had done the job it was tasked to do, in assessing opportunities for corporate tax changes and comparing that with the model endorsed by the previous States, the GST-plus package.
‘The aim of the game here for us is clarity. The whole point was that there was a question mark. That question had been asked, and we have set about answering it in a professional and comprehensive way. So the objective has been met,’ she said.
‘We have kicked the tyres a lot.’
You need to be logged in to comment.