Consequence of indecision is unsatisfactory results

AN EARWORM for you, all together now: 'my old man said foller the van, and don't dilly dally on the way.'

OK, enough of the music hall classic, but I drop it in there so we can reflect on what dillying and dallying leads to.

In the case of the wife following the van, she gets lost, and according to some gets drunk.

In the case of the States, opportunities get lost – and bills rack up.

Take the former Commerce and Employment's stance when the regulator wanted to investigate whether there had been a market abuse in the awarding of a States contract.

In 2014 it would not give Cicra any assurances that there would be funding to pursue the matter.

Two years later, P&R, presumably recognising the public interest in this issue, said that money should not block the regulator's work.

And it shouldn't. Cicra has to have the ability to judge when to police the competition law, otherwise it is worthless.

Even more so when public funds are in play.

But over this time memories fade and witnesses get cold feet – the chances of success diminish and we are forever left wondering what the contract was and who was responsible.

Even if there was not an abuse, the concern has to be that tendering procedures are not as tight as they should be because something was allowed to happen which led to the potential abuse – but they will not be tightened up because only the regulator and whoever tipped it off knows the detail of what might have happened.

So the States remains vulnerable, or at the very least, the public cannot have full confidence in the processes that are currently being followed.

How to unravel that without unfairly exposing the parties involved is something that the financial side of Scrutiny should be contemplating.

But again, this is not the time to dilly and dally.

Now Cicra has dropped its investigation, it is time for the political wheels to roll.

Scrutiny discussed the issue last week following a request by Deputy Barry Paint, who first raised the issue publicly.

Economic Development is scheduled to appear before the committee at a public hearing in early March, which gives it the chance again to get assurances over funding this type of investigation, but of course some accountability has been lost by the change in the board members since the election.

The committee could also pursue Cicra to get a better understanding of the issue, but where it sees this in the list of priorities is not so clear.

The dilly dally was also evident in the complaint Policy & Resources received over alleged inappropriate comments made by a senior States member to Deputy Marc Leadbeater.

In a wholly-unsatisfactory outcome, after around three weeks the member has neither been cleared or reprimanded, not that P&R has any express powers to do so.

This leaves a cloud hanging over the whole situation, unfairly implicating all senior members too as no one has been named.

The two bodies that complained could not go straight to the code of conduct panel because they did not know the person's name at the time, while P&R has been hamstrung because the member would not co-operate with its investigation and it needed witnesses to back up the complaint.

With the passing of time, the impetus has been lost – and a cynic would say that it has also allowed a narrative to 'explain' the alleged comments to be developed.

The statement released by P&R president Gavin St Pier when it confirmed it has dropped the investigation was telling, full of disappointment with the alleged comments, stressing that diversity and diversity awareness were taken very seriously – it went as far as it could under the circumstances.

The code of conduct route remains open to finally put this one to bed.

At the end of this week we should find out what happened with the Salerie Corner overspend – again, the wheels have turned slowly on this one.

An independent report was ordered right at the start of December.

While two-and-a-half months for this type of thing might be quick in the world of the States, it is glacial in anyone else's – there should be little impediment to getting in there, interviewing the relevant parties, getting out and concluding the report – it is hardly the most complicated of matters.

The project rose from a predicted £50,000 to around £130,000 and raises the question of when a budget is not a budget.

In this case the committee kept adding in more elements after it had agreed to go ahead – it had a rather loose interpretation of project planning.

Without the report's conclusion, the public has been left to make its own minds up about how the States handles its money.

Of course, the ultimate dilly dally has been the waste strategy.

That has been going along the way since the old Board of Administration days, indeed an energy from waste plant was meant to be up and running by 2002, so we should be talking about decommissioning and replacement now.

The consequence of indecision is that our last recognised landfill site has filled to such an extent that members this week are likely to approve a strategy they have severe misgivings about just because they have to do something.

You can do some sums that would suggest a hundred million pounds have been lost as a result.

Some of these are slightly abstract – the cost of the loss of landfill space, loss of the electricity an energy-from-waste plant would have produced, the cost of staff time and what hasn't been achieved because they've been working on this.

Others are much more concrete – like the £11m. paid out to bidders that have been dropped as the strategy chopped and changed, construction inflation and the like.

Whichever way you look at it, the waste strategy is the single biggest bill that any one unresolved issue has left – the dilly dally of all dilly dallies.