Secrets and skirmishes

HAVING cleared the logjam of government business created by the two months of the tax review debate, a more normal agenda has returned. It is unlikely to detain the States more than a day.

Education, Sport & Culture and Environment & Infrastructure will give their committee’s six-monthly progress reports to the Assembly. No doubt this will generate, or at least be followed by, questions to the respective presidents seeking further information on some of their committee’s key work.

Where are we on the secondary education transformation? On track, just – but perhaps only until the July capital programme debate, when the Assembly may have conniptions at the cost of it all. Where is the electricity strategy? In train, but delayed again. And there will be the usual array of questions focused on the less-core parts of their committee’s mandate. Something about Liberation Day is always an old favourite for ESC. And something about bicycle hoops fulfils a similar role for E&I.

Question time next. There are so many questions to ask about how on earth the States ended up buying a ship in the way it did, it’s difficult to know where to begin. But then it’s difficult to know who to ask. The project was green-lighted by Policy & Resources publicly 15 months ago – which won’t have helped the commercial negotiating position. The deal was going to be completed through the Guernsey Investment Fund, which sits outside the States and whose only connection to it is through any States’ funds invested into it. These are overseen by the States’ Investment Board. There is no direct line from the SIB to the Assembly but P&R, whose treasury lead is a non-voting observer of the SIB, is accountable for their work. In the event, the Civil Contingencies Authority did the deal, but unless and until they resolve among themselves otherwise, their work is locked and sealed and no one shall ever speak of it again. And whatever information is not subject to CCA-confidentiality can, no doubt, be shielded with the other old chestnut that it is subject to ‘commercial confidentiality’.

Far better we turn the Assembly’s time and weighty attention to noting (not making) appointments to Cicra, as well as a raft of regulations – the Plant Health (Preserved Phytosanitary Conditions Regulation) (Amendment) (Guernsey) Regulations, 2023 and the Parochial Elections (St Saviour) Regulations, 2023 are particularly eye-catching. There are a couple of actual appointments to be made – the director of civil aviation and the public trustee – and a couple of pieces of legislation, none of which will detain members for much more time than it takes for the States Greffier to organise the electronic vote on them, subject to three amendments from Deputies Dyke and Ferbrache tinkering with the legislative powers of the director of the Employment and Equal Opportunities Service.

That leaves only a couple of pieces of substantive business both, as it happens, from the Committee for Employment & Social Security. ESS as the sponsoring committee creates headwind for both policy letters. The Access to Work Scheme flows from the more-controversial-than-it-should-be Discrimination Ordinance. As part of the process of enacting that legislation, it was proposed that a scheme be established to fund specific adjustments that would otherwise not be provided because they would be disproportionate for an employer. The policy letter would enable small grants to be made from the Guernsey Insurance Fund (into which social security contributions are paid) for the provision of aids, equipment, occupational health assessments and so on. It is estimated that this will cost £50,000 a year.

Quite apart from it being the right thing to do, the policy letter argues that it is ‘spend to save’ in the sense that it will enable some disabled individuals to enter or retain employment, reducing benefits and increasing contributions and tax take. But after the tax review debacle, there is a risk that any additional spend on anything, however worthy, justified or sensible will be kicked out as a ‘nice-to-have’ luxury that needs to wait for sunnier days – or at least a time when the States can agree a tax strategy.

That is most likely to be the fate too of the second policy letter from ESS, proposing an interim uprating of benefits following the inflation spike that has trashed many household budgets in 2023. P&R’s letter of comment articulates the senior committee’s view that, in essence, as a majority of pensioners don’t need the increase, the proposal should not be approved. ESS will attempt, probably forlornly, to build on the arguments in the policy letter that, by definition, benefits are paid to those in most need, that inflation has not been properly taken into account in setting current rates and in any event, the largest part of the cost will not come out of this year’s budget but out of the contributions paid into the insurance funds.

ESS’s policy letters will be the first of many similar skirmishes that can be expected in the remaining two years of States’ meetings left in this term. In this post-tax debate era, expect to hear a lot of, ‘We’d like to do more, but...’.