Scrutiny needs to find its voice and skip the chitchat

TWO quick questions sprung to mind after last week's appearance of Education, Sport & Culture before the Scrutiny Committee.

Did anyone come away knowing anything new or did anyone get a better understanding of what we knew before?

The answer to both was, sadly, no.

That is a shame because with these monthly hearings there is a real chance to shine a light on the work of government, an opportunity to explain and examine.

It was perhaps doomed as soon as we knew the Education president Paul Le Pelley did not want to be there.

He had argued for a postponement until after the November debate.

That is indicative of the procrastination that has led to it taking an excruciating seven months for the committee to come to the conclusion that it really has no clear idea what direction to take secondary education in and quite fancies a guiding hand from the States.

As timing would have it, there should have been no better committee to have in for a hearing.

Education had released its secondary education report that morning – there was no more topical an issue.

This should have been live, relevant scrutiny, with a laser-sharp focus on that topic.

What ensued, though, was a scamper around the committee's entire mandate which was too broad to drill down into any issue.

Too often in the two hours, Deputy Le Pelley would drift off down memory lane, telling the panel about when he was teaching in draughty classrooms, or a hockey player taking on Jersey, for instance, and be allowed to go there.

Fine anecdotes, sure, the kind of friendly personal touch that got him elected, but not what anyone had turned up at Beau Sejour to hear.

Scrutiny is still finding its feet.

It is treading that line of not being too aggressive, turning the hearings into too much political theatre.

But if the members do not step in, do not challenge, do not press points home to the nth degree, committee presidents will simply talk their way to the next subject.

Most politicians love dealing in generalities and buzz words, statements that sound good, but mean nothing and contain no real detail.

Bad scrutiny will let them do that, good scrutiny will intervene – to use some journalism analogies, it needs to be more Paxman than Oprah, more Question Time than Good Morning Britain.

You cannot underestimate the importance of Scrutiny's role in this new States.

Austerity, budget cuts and tax rises are the name of the game. Every penny spent, every new initiative, every service dropped, it all needs to be properly justified.

Committees have wider mandates than in the past, more power is concentrated in fewer hands, and that needs to be counter-balanced.

Has this new States really grasped that?

Do we have signs of more investment in the committee, filling it with talent at staff level, and giving it the powers to do the job that it needs to do?

Is this new scrutiny, or just a re-badged version of old under-resourced scrutiny but with more work to do?

The hearings are the public- facing side of the role, but perhaps more important is the groundwork that goes on behind the scenes.

But the clock is ticking on Scrutiny too. It only has so long to establish itself as a force before a wave engulfs the States and all the main committees actually start doing something at a rate with which it will not keep up.

There are subjects aplenty for it to get involved with.

This Budget contains more breaches of the States fiscal framework, that overarching strategy it is meant to stick within but never does.

How about an incisive look at what is going on at Employment & Social Security with it pushing benefit changes down the road that only last term the States said were needed to help the very poorest in society.

Policy & Resources president Gavin St Pier will be the next to come before one of the committee's hearings, sometime next month.

With a mandate so focussed on broad high-level policy, Scrutiny would do well to find one topic and drill down into it.

It can too easily become a hearing where much is said without anything actually meaning anything.

It may be post the Budget debate, but that really is an area where decent cross-examination can boost public understanding.

Scrutiny needs to be driving the transparency agenda.

And this has to come not just from words but deeds.

So why block the release of letters that would show us whether, as it claims, Education, Sport & Culture president Paul Le Pelley refused twice to attend the hearing, or, whether, as he claims, he never said no, just that he wanted a delay.

Scrutiny cites an exemption in the code about protecting the frankness and candour of internal discussion.

That is patent nonsense to anybody outside the Frossard House bubble.

This is not a policy discussion which needs to be protected, where you could understand the hesitance – it is invitations to a meeting and responses to it.

Just what is so sensitive about that?

This is just over-zealous use of the code of the type warned about when it was implemented.

The States is still looking for reasons why it should not release information rather than why it should.