Guernsey Press

Big tensions in the islands

GUERNSEY and Alderney may be in a fiscal union, but that doesn’t mean that the two communities are always particularly united. In general, Guernsey people tend to feel a warm, avuncular affection for the northern isle, but most of us still aren’t mindful to write any blank cheques.

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Matters have in the last few years come to a head between Alderney, pictured, and Guernsey. (Picture by Adrian Miller, 21912783)

Conversely, most Alderney people I know oscillate between regarding Guernsey as a favourite older brother and a big bully selling them down the river.

I suppose those sorts of feelings are always going to be present in any smaller community partly dependant on a larger one. Guernsey’s constitutional ties with the UK often evoke a similar reaction here.

Lately the tensions between the two largest islands in our Bailiwick have been stoked by a number of factors, lots of them related to air travel.

There is a feeling on the streets of St Anne that Guernsey has been shamefully tardy in repairing and widening Alderney’s failing runway.

This has been compounded by frustration over some of the problems with Aurigny’s transition from Trislanders to Dorniers.

Then there has been public outrage over the inflammatory words/plain speaking (take your pick) of the vice president of Guernsey’s Policy & Resources Committee in respect of Alderney.

I also think the failure of the Home department to comply in a timely way with a very simple instruction from the States that Alderney’s youngsters should be treated more favourably under Guernsey’s population regime hasn’t exactly helped relationships.

In fact, the ongoing delays must feel like a real snub.

I am not going to go into any of those issues in depth. Instead I want to take a general look at attitudes in both islands and subject them to critical scrutiny. The points I make are likely to annoy those in both communities.

Firstly the argument that because we all pay the same taxes, we should enjoy exactly the same level of services is a patent nonsense. People in the Scilly Islands pay the same taxes as those in London (except for differing levels of community charge) but the provision of services could hardly be more different. Residents of St Mary don’t enjoy a metro, or a National History Museum or an Olympic park.

I know that sort of extreme comparison is silly, but so is the argument that just because Guernsey has one public indoor swimming pool at Beau Sejour serving its population of 63,000 it should also pay for something similar in Alderney. Yet that argument has been made quite often in the past.

The reality, all around the world, is that the bigger the community, the greater the range of services available.

It’s called economies of scale.

Of course things are a bit different when it comes to core services such as education or health.

Here there should be far more equality, but there’s still a universal rule that the smaller the community, the fewer services can be delivered close to home. Instead, citizens have to travel to access more specialised services, just like Guernsey people have to go to the UK for tertiary medical care or university education.

OK. Time to swap sides. The view among some in Guernsey that we can be in a fiscal union and yet not expect to have a flow of money from south to north is naive.

Ever since Guernsey agreed to establish a common exchequer in the 1940s, the likelihood that Alderney would be a net beneficiary rather than a net contributor was clear.

Indeed that was largely the point of the exercise as Alderney struggled to rebuild from the ravages of the war, which left it in a far worse state than Guernsey.

Why was it always likely to be that way? Again, it’s down to the diseconomies of scale.

For example, when the Mignot Memorial Hospital was redeveloped, the per-capita cost was the equivalent of a capital spend of several hundred million pounds on Guernsey’s health infrastructure.

Basically, very small communities either need to paddle their own canoes and have very basic services (think Sark) or else piggyback on larger neighbours.

So personally I have no qualms over Alderney being a net beneficiary from our union, but I have to agree with Deputy Trott that the quantum of cross-subsidy must have a limit, particularly with Guernsey’s finances under strain.

Some in Alderney have started to say that this is the wrong way of looking at it. Instead we should view Alderney like a Guernsey parish and nine of those are effectively subsidised by the economic powerhouse which is St Peter Port.

There are two problems with that argument. Firstly, Guernsey’s parishes don’t have separate economies. Most of the workers who spend their days driving the island’s economy in offices in Town or along Les Banques actually live in the other parishes. It is a single economy.

Secondly, those who make these arguments should be careful what they wish for. I suspect the frustrations with the current constitutional arrangement would pale into nothing if Alderney became just an 11th parish of Guernsey and the powers of their States reduced to those of a douzaine.

Before closing, it is worth considering why these inter-insular tensions seem to be particularly high at the moment. To some extent I suppose they are inherent in any relationship between two such similar but different communities, where the bigger partner seems to hold most of the cards. But I think there are some special factors at play here.

Firstly, as I mentioned earlier, problems with connectivity have brought matters to a head. More fundamentally, Alderney’s economy has undergone an almost existential crisis over the last decade. The total population has dropped significantly, although that now seems to have stabilised.

More significantly, the number of younger people in Alderney has plummeted. Such a worrying trend was bound to fray nerves and instil exasperation. It would here too.

Clearly it is in the best interest of both parties to our fiscal union to address these critical issues.

Guernsey needs to be empathetic and for some years there will need to be a significant and ongoing cross-subsidy.

On the other hand, Alderney needs to understand that we are very far from awash with money and so there are limits to what we can do.