If not the population law, what is the alternative?

LET'S have some radical thoughts for a moment.

Tomorrow, States members will head into the chamber to decide whether to trigger the new population law.

Eight years of work has gone into devising a mechanism for controlling who comes to work and live in Guernsey, for turning the tap on and off.

When that work started there was a very real belief, and there still is among some, that hoards were queuing up at the border waiting to take all the jobs, buy all the houses, while clogging up the roads and generally ruining the peace and tranquillity of island life to the point we ended up being Hong Kong – that there really was a flow behind the tap to turn on and off.

And, once, there may well have been, although visions of Hong Kong were always far-fetched.

Pre the financial crisis, you remember, the economy was booming, jobs were plentiful, the sun was shining every day and Iceland was best known for viewing the aurora borealis.

What has been widely acknowledged so far was that the housing control law that the new regime is replacing and was in operation then did very little to control population numbers, it touched only a small fraction.

So what was?

Mostly, it seems, the state of the economy.

You can plot economic growth against population and see the correlation.

Now there were other factors at play, there always will be, but it's difficult to think that any had such a key impact on the pull of workers.

There were some nuanced remarks made by Deputy Gavin St Pier to the Chamber of Commerce lunch last week which highlights something of this school of thought.

He said that the premise that Guernsey will be able to successfully manage the size of its population using a legislative regime which requires an administrative system to operate it is unproven.

Supply and demand for jobs and price of housing was principally what regulates population numbers, he said.

'Therefore if we want to control population numbers, it is to policies which influence those markets to which we should turn,' he said.

So here's the radical thought.

Do we need the population management law at all? Could the States rely on a policy-based approach – or even a do-nothing approach?

Some deputies have called for a delay, for tweaks, none has been brave enough to say start again – and start again from a fresh perspective.

Even Deputy St Pier stopped short of that, arguing for implementing the new regime because it offered the flexibility that the last one did not.

After years of work, so much consultation, so much creation of expectation, lining everyone up for the changes ahead, there is no appetite for being radical.

There is something concrete and understandable about what is on the table now – employment permits based around timescales, residence certificates with lines drawn in the sand.

That is comforting and re-assuring, even if it is in many ways only an illusion.

The States has created an administrative apparatus that itself comes at a cost to the taxpayer, some would argue it has created a monster.

Time will tell.

Mischievously fun as it might be, there is no point ripping things up before they are given a chance to see if they work. The new regime does need to be given time.

Can it respond to the island's needs and show us this much-hyped 'flexibility'?

If the economy starts booming, can it give control, but not the type of control that stifles success.

Conversely, if the economy continues to drag along as it is now, can this regime help meet the States policy of maintaining a sufficient working population to keep ticking along.

We have heard plenty in the past few weeks from the business groups, who have come far too late to the party.

Plenty of noise, that is, but not enough substance.

They have single-handedly failed to articulate an alternative vision and a knockout reason for not implementing the new regime.

Their argument goes that as Brexit has happened we need to rethink the eight years of work that has gone into devising a mechanism to control the population.

What is missing is how they would adjust the law to take account of whatever the impact of Brexit is that they are trying to guard against.

Brexit is their Keyser Soze – a feared character nobody has yet met who wields enormous power and influence.

But it should not be a case of cry Brexit and stop.

Two years of negotiations lie ahead before we get a chance to see how the UK severing its ties with the EU really shapes up, with the long-term impacts clearly lying beyond that too.

So while there has been a Brexit vote, we still do not know what it means for labour movements, for example.

The main focus of complaint from some business seems to be the loss of the ability for guest workers to work nine months on, three months off in perpetuity, yet there is no politician who has stood up to keep that part of the current regime.

Those that are opposing it at this late stage need to be able to say what they would replace the current proposals with – that includes the Economic Development president – otherwise delay only creates uncertainty for business, and therefore the economy, at a time when stability is more important than ever.

The framework being put in place should be malleable enough to cope when we really do know what Brexit means.

Housing control dates back some 60 years.

It is an easy bet to say that this regime will not last that long – and nor should it.

Perhaps next time around the radical policy-based approach would have become mainstream – after all, planning has shifted from colouring in boxes and boundaries to dictate who can build what where and who would have thought that a couple of decades ago?

Perhaps the island will be in a position that all it needs to do is prevent serious criminals moving over – and stop its younger generation from moving away – and let the economy do the rest.

A population management regime to do that would be radically different.