The period of calm will not last long for new Assembly

LAST week the States carved up the committee seats with barely a whimper of dissent.

It was just as well because the election process had become interminable, brightened only by the Wild West antics of the president votes.

Members might complain that they need more time to find out where they or their colleagues are best suited to sit, but there is a government to run.

It is hardly like there are job descriptions and robust interviews to go through to find the best man or woman. It's more a case of emails here, phone calls there and job's a good/bad'un for maybe the next four years because there are no hire-and-fire powers vested in the leaders.

If there is a solution to this headache of putting the right people in the right jobs it rests with either mid-term elections, overlapping terms or party politics, none of which seem likely any time soon.

The final allocation of seats has, perhaps inadvertently, made the start of a case for cutting the number of deputies further.

Only seven of the 40 deputies have seats on two principal committees.

Add in the main committee presidents to that and it means that around two-thirds of the Assembly will be trying to make full-time jobs out of a seat on a main committee and at best one or two other minor roles.

Now, there is a great unknown in all this at the moment – just how much work will each committee demand, especially given the wider mandates?

Let's just hope that Parkinson's law does not start to apply because then we are faced with the dubious prospect of States members finding ways of busying themselves, which usually means heading off down some blind alleyways and some wasted hours for the civil service and all the costs that entails.

It is, of course, too early to make a cast-iron case about a further cull in the headcount.

We may also see this States operate with the fluidity being demanded of the public sector beneath it, people being parachuted in to do specialist work in their areas of expertise.

Hopefully the workloads will be clearer by the time the referendum on island-wide voting is due.

A single vote for the whole Assembly would be an unwieldy beast at best for 40 members, but every time the headcount is reduced the prospect of it becoming manageable grows.

A keen eye will be kept on the way scrutiny operates in this Assembly because that holds one of the other keys to the optimum number of members.

If the new management committee, whose three members are all welcomingly free of seats on the policy-making committees, is successful then some of the fears of a further reduction in numbers can be curtailed.

There has been an argument, not one I follow, that more is better because there is less power concentration and more eyes to keep things in check.

A strong scrutiny arm helps make the case by creating a better balance between the doers and the scrutineers.

There is only one member who finds himself without portfolio at this stage.

Deputy Charles Parkinson suffered heavy defeats in both the race to be Policy and Resources president and the top job at Education, Sports & Culture.

The States had spoken and in response Deputy Parkinson decided that was that.

The record last term of people who promised to create some kind of self-styled role from the backbenches was hardly spectacular, but Deputy Parkinson is in a particularly tricky position because he is unlikely to be the first port of call for others looking for advice given the policy positions he has taken up.

A pure constituency position does not seem a natural fit with his talents, so how does he make effective use of the next four years in office? He will not be quiet, that is for sure.

There are some other interesting nuances that will play out over this term.

The political/staff dynamics at Home Affairs, with the former head of Customs on the committee, and Education with a former teacher as president, will be interesting.

Both Health & Social Care and Home Affairs have been left with four political novices on the committees, which given the size and importance of their mandates is something of a concern.

The former now has to undergo significant transformation to deliver the savings promised by an independent review at the back end of last term, the latter is alongside Education about to be subject to the same assessment.

We now enter some downtime when the States members tend to go off the radar as they find out exactly what they have let themselves in for – perhaps checking out the handover letters from their predecessors and hoping none of them say there is no money left.

After the policy-making whirlwind of the end of last term and the drawn-out election process, even the Policy and Resources president has effectively called for a period of calm, urging committees to not come up with new policies until it has had a chance to get its vision in place.

Their first debate will be a jolly old affair where they back hosting the Island Games and encourage us to gamble more on a few lottery tickets to help fund it. Still, it's not like that kind of thing can be counted as a saving, is it?

So it begins.