Damning reports and dirty washing

Home Affairs

May 2016 deputies: Lowe, Graham, Prow, Oliver and Leadbeater.

Mid-2019 onwards deputies: Lowe, Leadbeater, Oliver, Smithies, Le Pelley

OF ALL the seven principal States committees, Home Affairs arguably places the least demands on its political members.

Bailiwick Law Enforcement (Police and Border Agency), the Fire and Rescue Service, the Guernsey Prison and the Probation Service are all in the hands of experienced professionals. They all know what they are required to do and how to do it, and all that is needed from the committee’s politicians is sensible political oversight and a duty to ensure that essential emergency services are appropriately resourced and funded and in return are giving the community value for money. Even such major, out-of-field legislation as the 2017 Population Management Law, the 2018 Data Protection Law and the 2020 Sexual Offences Law were largely the product of talented civil servants and Crown advocates, requiring only straightforward political input until the principal political role kicked in, namely that of securing support for them in the States Assembly.

Keeping the Home Affairs show on the road is therefore relatively easy, but strategic foresight and holistic planning are also necessary elements across the whole justice and security piece and these place altogether more testing demands on the political membership and leadership. As we were to see.

The committee that took office in May 2016 inherited a right old mess from its predecessor committee. How so? For a start, the Guernsey Prison was insecure, some of its security infrastructure having been allowed to fall into disrepair. The Joint Emergency Services Control Centre (JESCC) was itself in emergency status: a hopelessly-optimistic budget was out of control; controllers could not be recruited, trained and retained in sufficient numbers; and the ill-prepared addition of a coastguard desk constituted a serious danger to safety at sea. Guernsey Police had not been inspected by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary for nearly 10 years and, although the long-serving head of law enforcement was due for retirement, no succession plan was in place. Oh, and for good measure, the committee’s experienced chief secretary had just days before been let go on transfer without a replacement in sight. In terms of a hand-over from one committee president to another, this was what we rugby players call a ‘hospital pass’, the equivalent of passing a greasy ball to a 12-stone winger just as he is about to be crunched by a 20-stone prop forward.

Receiving the pass as president, Deputy Mary Lowe gathered round her four political ‘rookies’: myself as vice-president; Rob Prow, later my successor as vice-president when I stepped down on being elected as vice-president of Education, Sport & Culture; Marc Leadbeater and Victoria Oliver. When Rob Prow and I both resigned from the committee in 2019 in order to challenge the Staite Report, Marc Leadbeater stepped up as vice-president, and Jeremy Smithies and Paul Le Pelley filled the two vacancies for the remaining year of the political term.

Towards the end of 2017 the original new committee could look back after some 18 months of its term of office with some satisfaction. The prison was no longer insecure and the JESCC was in much improved health. The Police and Border Agency had been inspected with its report awaited, and a clear succession plan was in place for the Head of Law Enforcement. The controversial Population Management Regime had been introduced on time, albeit much amended after a bruising debate in the States as deputies sought to balance the often conflicting interests of the economy, the environment, and human rights, all the while aware that Guernsey is already high among the most densely populated territories in the western world and is bursting at the seams.

The initial serene passage of the new committee met its first choppy waters in late 2018 when Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (who dreams up these tongue-twisting titles?) published the report of their inspection of Bailiwick Law Enforcement. Ten years having passed since the last inspection, it was hardly surprising that at the operational level a total of 26 areas for improvement were identified, together with eight firm recommendations for action, but it was the report’s conclusion that the committee had badly mishandled the political/operational interface that drew the keenest political and media attention, much of it laced with large doses of schadenfreude.

It is my view – as the committee member most insistent that the inspection’s terms of reference should include the issue of operational independence – that the report’s criticisms of the committee were fair comment, albeit some were based on examples which on close examination lacked due substance. That said, in a small tight community such as ours, where in the supermarket aisle a committee member will be tapped on the shoulder and asked why the police haven’t arrested the next-door neighbour, or where other deputies are noisily demanding that something must be done about pavement surfing along the Bailiff’s Cross Road, it is easy for committee members to get drawn into operational matters – indeed, some would say it is their duty.

Be that as it may, the committee had been politically wounded and, sensing blood, P&R commissioned Professor Staite to review Home Affairs’ governance. In a report laced with personal antagonism, the reviewer presented a bleak, dystopian picture of the committee’s political membership. In the first draft, which was not made public, the president, Mary Lowe, was portrayed as the absurd caricature of a sinister career politician, a sort of mafiosa figure with a gang of four subservient, first-time politicians on the make who timidly let her rule the Home Affairs roost in the role of Guernsey’s very own Donna Corleone. Certain members of P&RC could scarcely contain their glee and in June 2019, in the temporary absence from the assembly of the P&R president, and just as Deputy Lowe prepared to speak in debate on behalf of Home Affairs, the P&R vice-president handed her a letter from the senior committee demanding her resignation, or else. Not so much a stab in the back as a full-frontal stab in the painful area of the top bench.

Not for nothing are Deputy Lowe’s powers of survival legendary. She called P&R’s bluff and no resignation was offered. Nor was a vote of confidence demanded, which left the Home Affairs president to replenish her committee with Deputies Smithies and Le Pelley and hunker down for a calm final year of office this term. If only!

One year later, despite the need to confront such momentous matters as the Covid-19 emergency and the looming prospect of a no-deal Brexit, Home Affairs somehow contrived to create a massive distraction all by itself by bringing a proposition to the States to sack one of its own members.

This incomprehensible political misjudgement had a predictable outcome. The debate became a farce, with the committee requesting that its own proposition be withdrawn whilst the rest of the States members, some of whom could hardly believe their luck, insisted it be debated. So the committee’s dirty washing was not so much aired within the Assembly as waved around so all members could smell the stench. At the end of it all, the Home Affairs membership remained intact but at the cost of a deep, perhaps irreparable, dent in its reputation.

If the Home Affairs members were conducting their own review of the past four and a bit years, they would wish to point to some successes. Laws relating to Population Management, Data Protection and Sexual Offences have all been enacted on time. By international standards our levels of crime remain relatively low, detection rates high and reoffending rates low, especially for those serving prison sentences of longer than one year. Our borders have been kept secure at a time when the need for security within the Bailiwick bubble could scarcely be more vital to our wellbeing. Our Fire and Rescue Service is well-led and cost-effective while our prison is once more secure and continues to follow the sensibly-progressive regime established under the previous prison governor. Just how much credit for the operational efficiency of the emergency services should be ascribed to the political members is of course a moot point, but on the basis that the committee would be blamed if these services were performing poorly, it is only fair to acknowledge that the committee has indeed kept the Home Affairs show on the road within a period of tight budgetary control.

But if the States expected significant innovation and strategic thinking from Home Affairs, they will be disappointed. There has been what amounts to tinkering here and there, a bit of cut and paste and page turning, but no imaginative new chapters written. Nothing came of a potential merger of the fire and ambulance services, despite the success of such amalgamations elsewhere. There seems to have been no progress in an initiative proposed four years ago to introduce mandatory, post-release engagement by the probation services with those prisoners most likely to reoffend within a year of release from prison, namely those who have served only short terms inside. We might have expected this to be included in the long-anticipated review of justice policy, but that too never came. To be precise, the review did arrive but in the unsatisfactory form of a so-called ‘Green Paper’ rather than as part of a policy letter which could have committed the States to action. A holistic review across the entire justice policy piece is undoubtedly a demanding task, but the committee had four years in which to do it and fell short. In the absence of a policy letter, the States approved a sursis motive which effectively tasked the next Home Affairs committee to bring a justice framework containing detailed proposals to the States by no later than December 2022. So, yet more delay and an opportunity lost for this Home Affairs committee to end its term of office on a high note rather than with the enduring image of that dirty washing hanging limply from the clothes line of the 2016-20 political narrative.

Rating over four years: 4/10