A capital issue in need of a united solution
THE notion that the States does not know how to spend our money wisely is not new or surprising. What is puzzling is that it does so little to address the issue.
Today’s report by Scrutiny Management on capital spending is an excellent dissection of a well-understood problem. But now that the innards of the ailing patient are laid bare on the operating table has the States the stomach to do something about it?
No one has managed to during all the years of underinvestment when hundreds of millions of pounds of capital spending went missing in action.
That was despite the government being in breach of its own rules and despite the annual admonishment of economic experts hired by the States for precisely such a purpose.
In reality, there should be no need for professors to remind deputies of common-sense economics that are understood in homes across the land: fail to repair a leaking roof and you will quickly live to regret it.
Nor does it take a 36-page report compiled by a panel of the island’s best to understand that it is better to spend a set amount each year on infrastructure than encourage a boom-and-bust building industry with feast then famine.
Workers find other jobs, skills disappear and the next time a large project comes along local firms are incapable of handling it themselves and non-island staff and corporations are brought in.
Instead of hundreds of millions of pounds being injected into the local economy through workers paying taxes, buying properties and spending in the high street the cash disappears off island, never to be seen again.
The frustration that the basic rules of trickle down economics have been ignored for so long is only compounded by the lingering doubt that even with the damage done to the island laid out in such stark detail nothing will be done to reverse it.
For this is not a problem that can be solved by one department, one senior civil servant or one politician.
It is a systemic problem affecting the whole States that requires fundamental change.
Chief among those is the need to prioritise. The Assembly must find a way to decide which projects are the most important – and then get them done.