Kicking this can down the road is not an option

A complex blizzard of data, jargon and projections they are a delight only for those who love to crunch numbers.

Nevertheless, the two reviews released yesterday – into the Guernsey Insurance Fund and the Long-term Care Fund – should be required reading for all deputies.

For if it is accepted the island has long been deaf to the ticking of its demographic timebomb, this is the klaxon of a final countdown.

The five-year reviews offer Employment & Social Security more evidence that, without drastic action, the funds will be quickly depleted.

Quick is, of course, a relative term. It will take 19 years for the pot of cash in the Guernsey Insurance Fund – which helps people in their old age, during bereavement, incapacity, unemployment, maternity and death – to be emptied.

It will take another 13 years for the Long-term Care Fund – which helps with private nursing and residential care home bills – to read £0.

While 2039 and 2053 might seem long distant for teenagers impatiently counting off their birthdays, in actuarial terms, for two funds holding a total more than £800m., it is tomorrow.

This is a problem that can be ignored no longer. Even if States members believe that actuarial work is an imprecise mix of assumptions about net inward migration, earnings growth and investment returns the reviews cannot be dismissed.

States members in the last Assembly knew all this but chose in August to kick a battered can down the road one last time. In the case of the Long-term Care Fund it suited deputies who were facing the electorate in a few weeks’ time to bravely resist any attempt to get pensioners who own their homes to put £35,000 of its value towards their health care.

While no doubt a vote-winning decision, it did nothing to solve the impending crisis.

The eye-watering increases to contributions outlined by ESS yesterday show that there is no painless way out of this.

Some deputies will argue that, with the economy in crisis, this is not the time.

But if not now, when?