Does the key worker housing brief have the correct objectives?

THERE’S a saying in the industry I used to work in. It’s not polite so I won’t be explicit but the thrust of it is: ‘if the brief is no good, the outcome will be no good’.

And that’s what I want to focus on to explain why I, as the vice-president of the Committee for Health & Social Care, am a signatory to a requete that aims to prevent building new key worker housing on a green field within the Princess Elizabeth Hospital site.

It may be a surprise that, politically, the whole HSC committee had little to no oversight into the brief that has resulted in the suggestion 150 units of accommodation for key workers could be built on ‘The Valley’, a protected Agricultural Priority Area on the Princess Elizabeth Hospital site, situated between the main hospital and the Duchess of Kent House/Vauquiedor building. To those on the inside it shouldn’t be that surprising because, after all, key worker housing is in the mandate of the Committee for Employment & Social Security. However, I sit on that committee too and I know that its members haven’t been consulted either.

Why does this matter? Well, because the brief ultimately dictates the outcome, but what if the brief isn’t right? If it isn’t, then the outcome won’t be right either and as it stands we’ve got a controversial outcome from a brief that doesn’t appear to be based on anything particularly robust.

Logically then, if the brief changes then the outcome might change and right now the outcome is controversial, not only to your average Guernsey folk who don’t want even more of our green spaces lost, but it’s so contrary to our planning laws that are in place to protect green spaces like this that a special ‘strategic’ loophole would need to be used to allow it to go ahead.

Not having seen the formal brief, I’m unsure of its exact aims, however they seem to be: to provide 150 units of one or two bedroomed accommodation, within 500 metres of the PEH and to be built ‘soon’.

That’s a pretty narrow set of criteria and will inevitably limit the available options so it didn’t give the poor souls at States Property Services a lot to work with.

Of course, we need the accommodation, that is beyond doubt. We need more key worker accommodation than we can shake a stick at and I, and the other requerants, completely support the case for that but does it really need to be that many right on the PEH’s doorstep? Thus far, I have seen no data that shows that key workers want to live on, or close to, the PEH site.

Key worker accommodation of this sort makes the incorrect and outdated assumption that our health workers are all single people who are happy to live on the doorstep of where they work and this simply isn’t true. If we are aiming to attract and retain long-term members of staff, then do we really think that apartments ‘above the shop’ are what long-term residents and families want? Of course, we do rely quite heavily on agency staff in Guernsey, we always will to some extent and currently that reliance is at a high due to the competitive environment seen across the country for health workers.

But in the long term our strategy should be seeking to move away from agency staff as they are expensive and, by their very nature, temporary and in some areas of our health service consistency is absolutely key to the best outcomes for the service user or patient. If we build more of this sort of accommodation, which naturally appeals to short-term members of staff, we are making heavy use of agency staff into our future strategies unintentionally and at great expense, both financially and in terms of health outcomes.

A questionnaire that was sent to a variety of key workers (not just health key workers) regarding accommodation in 2021 asked about the types of accommodation they would prefer, however a question regarding proximity to the work site wasn’t asked at all, so how on earth do we know that our health workers want to live right on top of where they work?

Anecdotally, the HR department will tell us that some people say they want to be near the site because of finishing shifts at odd times. Conversely, the key-worker housing team tell us that more and more key workers, especially those taking up long-term posts – the sort that we desperately need to attract and retain as opposed to expensive short term agency workers – want to have their own private property, in the community, away from their place of work. So, with those opposing messages in mind, how did ‘500 metres from the PEH’ become an anchoring principle of this brief?

Those proposing the scheme will say we know that’s what health key workers want because the staff accommodation that is already on the PEH site, John Henry Court, is always full and has a long waiting list, but that’s no proof that if we picked it up and moved it somewhere else that it would no longer be in demand. It’s the best self-contained staff accommodation that we have and it’s cheaper to live there than in private rental, so of course it’s what is requested most.

Surely if we’re going to concrete over a protected green space, there has to be more justification for it than that?

Moving on to the requirement that the accommodation ‘can be built soon’, this is a part of the brief that I can’t argue with; we need it and we need it now. But does the green field ‘solution’ actually satisfy that part of the brief? If, next week, the requete fails and the green field development is pursued, the professionals at SPS tell us that it’ll be about three years before those key workers are walking through the front door and hanging their coats up.

Not only is the brief very possibly not based on the correct criteria, not only will it have been irreversibly damaging to the environment but it doesn’t actually solve the problem at hand and that problem is where we house our key workers right now, this month, next month, next year even.

When I stood for election, on my website I made the following statement:

‘If elected I will consistently ask myself these questions when making a decision on your behalf:

• Will this improve the economic, physical or mental wellbeing of those who need it most?

• Will this reduce our impact on the environment?

• Have I seen concrete evidence to justify this?’

In relation to this suggestion, two out of the three answers are an emphatic ‘no’.