Scrutiny must spend more time in public gaze

The committee itself says that anyone engaged in the scrutiny process has no power to compel the government to change what it is doing, but relies on the ‘power of influence’ to achieve impact. As a result, it admits that it can be ‘challenging’ to evaluate how effective its work is in improving the effectiveness of government.

This week there could be a States debate on that report, at a time when one deputy has openly floated the idea of making it non-political.

One has doubts that people from outside the States might truly understand what goes on within it, but if the point is improving the effectiveness of the process, then it might be worthy of further explanation.

Scrutiny’s work on States finances and legislation flies completely below the radar, while its specially-commissioned reviews are rare, dogged by long-winded process, and seem particularly futile, such is their dated nature come time of publication.

The strength of Scrutiny has to be in its two-hour public sessions with the major committees, and the news stories and publicity which emerge from those sessions.

It often takes fellow politicians with an understanding to attempt to tease out what they want to receive the oxygen of publicity, and even sometimes issues which they did not know of – it’s unlikely that anyone expected P&R to announce at one point that it was buying a boat, for example.

The biggest disappointment then is that Scrutiny has run only three of those sessions in the year to date (though two more have just been plugged in). Scrutiny could be simple and effective, and probably cheaper, if there was a session staged every couple of weeks, and it allowed the media and inquisitive public to do the rest.