Right move, but at the wrong time
THE Chief Minister was certainly heartfelt when he addressed the States yesterday morning.
We believe he wants to do his best for Guernsey. And we believe it when he says: ‘This must not be a lame duck assembly.’
Hence a regathering of the troops, and a new, seemingly energised campaign to cut budgets, live within means, and get to grips with the island’s finances.
The 2024 Budget will need committees to deliver real-terms savings of between 2.5 and 3%, he announced. The capital projects portfolio is now under a stress-test review.
He talked of refocusing government priorities; ‘being clear on what we can and cannot deliver’; considering, nay, looking ‘more fundamentally’, at how do to things differently in the future. All within 12 months.
It’s a States of action now, all right, admittedly not the kind of action Deputy Ferbrache would have hoped to be leading when he came into office.
However the thought remains – if much of this had been set in train late in 2020, instead of simply working on a policy letter to promote a goods and services tax to get past a sceptical public which had largely voted for smaller government, then public sector finances might now be in a stronger position, and there might have been more public buy-in for revenue-raising that we had come to recognise as essential, not apparently desirable.