Politicians must learn to get to the point

SOMETIMES, it is all in the delivery.

A great idea, a great initiative, a great policy, will be seen as such only if the message is clear to the public. It is why some inventions take off while others flounder – and timing is everything.

And now, more than ever, there is no excuse for not letting the public know exactly what is going to happen.

Where the States often struggles is in answering the question: what does it mean for me?

Sometimes that is because it is too soon to answer – unpalatable to the public, who know that somewhere someone has worked through all the different scenarios.

Sometimes it is because the policy is full of holes – a criticism levelled at the earliest attempts to overhaul the population policy, for example.

Sometimes it is plain politics – the truth is inconvenient and

liable to be unpopular.

That last trick should become increasingly difficult to pull off with all the ways people now communicate – and with plans to bring in some form of freedom of information regime.

The States is currently engaged in some major policy changes that will impact on everyone in the island.

It has taken different approaches to each one.

With the waste strategy, it has promised much and made much of its attempts to take islanders with it.

It held workshops with the public and representatives of key groups in an unprecedented attempt to involve people in policy making.

This has raised expectations and the recent unravelling of key components of it showed that to some degree it was mis-sold, or at least the intentions were not made as clear as they should have been.

The recently launched review of personal taxation, benefits and pensions has taken a more measured, in some ways low-key, approach. There have been a couple of public meetings to explain the options and yesterday came the announcement that two more were planned.

Whereas waste gave the impression that the public was being asked to help make policy, this is much more top down.

It is big picture stuff, so how representative the consultation will be of the wider public if it does not actively go out to ask people is a question Frossard House will have to ask itself.

Organised interest groups will always respond to promote their philosophy at this stage. They always will.

But it is only when the changes start to bite – a young couple lose their mortgage interest relief, a pensioner gets less money – that it grabs the wider imagination.

And that, too, is a failure to communicate – and arguing it is within a 200-page strategy document will do little to placate an angry public.

For a short time, the Budget contained a handy little scenarios guide which helped to head off that type of backlash, but that has been lost in the sands of time.

The taxation and benefits review is set to deliver this year and next. It has signalled that purely because of demographics things need to change, but one of the key tests to come is avoiding the confusion and anger that surrounded the initial foray into mortgage interest relief.

Two vision documents – one by Health and Social Services and one by Education – are again very different beasts, mainly because there is so little meat on the bone.

Both departments may sit back very pleased that there has been little dissent so far, but that is probably because there is nothing hard and fast on the table.

Long-term visions tend to get an easy ride until it comes to delivery – in the past, politicians have made the mistake of relying to much on the mild euphoria of the reception of the vision or strategy in arguing for the delivery.

And then we come to population.

A much, much slower burn than taxation and benefits.

There was some mild tinkering in the 2004 to 2008 term; an attempt at drafting a new management regime during the term that followed to decouple this from the question of how big Guernsey's population should be.

The broad principles were boxed off before the election, but the detail was left to be worked on.

Now this States is being asked to endorse some 50-odd recommendations in a large and dry report – but with some aspects, such as the transition from the old regime to a new one for those living in lodging houses – still lacking that detail.

So after nearly a decade of work, the question of 'what does it mean for me?' still goes unanswered.

The Policy Council certainly missed a trick when it failed to make sure a senior minister was there to talk about the proposed new regime on the first phone-in that followed its release.

It left an information gap for others to exploit.

It must think hard now about how to engage people in all its reforms – there are so many ways to do it now, traditional media, social media, public meetings, the list goes on – that there should be no excuse for anyone to be taken by surprise.

And it must throw off the chains of bureaucratic language that plague its reports and find ways to be concise with the message.