More than 300 of these resolutions date back to previous States Assemblies before July 2025.
But some deputies believed that the States should be far stricter in looking to kill off some of the resolutions where no, or next to no, progress is being made.
Deputy Haley Camp described the workings of the States as ‘bonkers’.
‘I have been reassured that the process is at least less bad than what preceded it. It’s reassuring to know that that’s the measure against which we consider the point or purpose of something,’ she said.
‘Some of these resolutions here are older than my son, and he’s about to go into his third year of university.
‘Surely we should take a sensible approach and eliminate resolutions when they haven’t been delivered, in two examples, within 20 years of them being approved?’
She highlighted that far too many issues were on the plate of the Policy & Resources Committee, which formed a bottleneck and an ‘inherent structural weakness’.
Cross-committee work, on the whole, did not promote collaboration but lacked accountability and risked slowing down process, she said.
And the backlog as a whole showed that ‘the system is better at making decisions than completing them; government prioritises decision-making and policy generation over execution and closure, and there are too many parallel priorities’.
‘Everything becomes important, and execution suffers as a result.’
She said that the list offered lessons to the States – to stop adding new commitments without retiring old ones, to radically prioritise, and to assign a single point of accountability for each resolution.
‘We need to do fewer things bigger and faster,’ she said.
‘We need to strengthen delivery capacity, not just policy design, and we need to kill or update out-of-date decisions.’
Deputy Rhona Humphreys noted that many specific due or target dates for resolutions had been missed.
‘It doesn’t seem right to me that that can go unchallenged for a number of years,’ she said, suggesting a mechanism for updating the States when specific dates were missed.
But Deputy John Gollop was less amenable to any ‘bonfire’ of resolutions. He thought that the debate demonstrated a chronic lack of planning.
‘I’ll be reluctant, I think, to vote for many of these decisions, because many of them are actually work in progress, and I don’t believe the States and the new members have had a chance fully to decide what resolutions they want, and so it’s premature to jettison the work of previous committees and members. I do think this is one of the most depressing elements of our work. Maybe it’s why we don’t want to engage with it,’ he said.
‘We’ve got to do better than this. We need to engage more with the team at St James Chambers and find out what the blocks are, and if they are bad political phrasing, or lack of resource from departments, or lack of guidance, we need to address that.
‘This is a wake-up call that before imposing tax changes, we should understand what we’ve got to do and ensure that we do it. Maybe every committee between now and the autumn should have a workshop just on these issues, not just their own resolutions, but how they relate to other committees.’
Policy & Resources president Lindsay de Sausmarez said that the States of 2016-2020 had made 2,050 resolutions. Its successor made 1,980, and the current States made 219 in its first year in government. In response to Deputy Camp, she said that the debate offered the chance to prioritise, strengthen delivery and kill off outdated resolutions, while the States could stop making so many resolutions at any time.
‘All of the resolutions that we have listed here have come about because this assembly has supported them by a majority. It is in this assembly’s gift to stop adding new propositions.’
Deputies could have brought amendments to remove resolutions – Deputy de Sausmarez admitted that she was quite surprised that nobody did – after committees had been consulted.
‘Personally, I would encourage engagement with the relevant committees, because they are best placed to be able to advise on why they believe resolutions are still relevant and should still be kept on the books.’
In response to Deputy Humphreys, she said that target dates being missed were usually a factor of unrealistic targets being set in the first place.
‘It certainly just doesn’t really help anyone if we’ve got unrealistic dates,’ she said.
‘I would say it would be preferable to address this problem at source, if we can just try to get more realistic dates baked into propositions that would probably stop this problem from occurring with quite such regularity.’