Andrew Niles won a three-way contest to win the seat on Policy & Resources last week. He was the committee’s nomination to replace Deputy Gavin St Pier, who resigned following his re-arrest on allegations of misconduct in public office, which he denies.
Deputy Niles said he had spoken to both Policy & Resources president Lindsay de Sausmarez and Deputy Mark Helyar, who had also stood to lead the senior committee, about a role on P&R after last summer’s elections.
He said that both had encouraged him to stand for Economic Development and he said he had enjoyed his time on that committee, which he will now have to leave.
‘Probably the timing isn’t perfect for me, it probably isn’t for P&R and it certainly isn’t for Economic Development I’m sure. But timing is never perfect, we are where we are and I’m committed to it.’
Deputy Niles said he had spoken to Deputy Helyar as STSB president and he would remain on that committee.
‘There’s substantial work between the two committees and we’d like to see how we can improve those communications across it and how we can improve the delivery of projects,’ he said.
Deputy Niles joins the senior committee in the final weeks as it pulls together its final report on the tax and funding review.
He said he was keen to discover where the committee was but was prepared to believe that taxes would have to rise. He said that the ‘social contract’ between government and islanders had changed markedly since the 1950s but taxes largely had not.
‘So a revision to our overall tax regime has to be representative of what our population wants from the public sector. Nobody can deliver something for nothing.’
Deputy Niles admitted that he might be cut from a rather different political cloth than his colleagues on P&R, and that president Lindsay de Sausmarez had proposed him as someone who would bring something different to the committee.
‘Sometimes on committees, we put people who are similar or perhaps have similar philosophy or ideology together and you don’t get the best possible outcome from it,’ he said.
‘I think that probably my leanings are more conservative perhaps than some of the liberal leanings of those on the committee today, and I think that that diversity of thought probably will help us perhaps in the way that we represent ourselves.’
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