Moving mountains

Think Himalayas, when the then island of India slammed (if you can ‘slam’ at 6cm per annum, but let that pass) into the Eurasian plate around 50 million years ago. The resulting impasse created the familiar peaks that people queue to climb today, sadly with increasingly fatal consequences in the case of Mount Everest.

In passing, if you are thinking of giving it a go, best not dawdle – the mountains there continue to grow at about a centimetre a year as neither tectonic plate is prepared to give ground and slide, or subduct, below the other.

States of Guernsey chief executive Paul Whitfield understands this stuff, and the upheaval unyielding and conflicting forces can create, which is why his own public sector transformation process, launched in 2015, is deliberately inching along.

Read his latest update and you get a good sense of the progress that has been made. I had intended to go into the IT/Agilisys project – which is very much a good news development and a significant part of it – but the bank holidays got in the way, so that must wait.

Meanwhile, what we can see is that Mr Whitfield and his senior team, supported by Policy & Resources and others, is attempting to halt the inexorable drift of 70 years of committee system development – AKA silo government – and remodel it as something more suited to today’s circumstances.

This is not easy. There’s already been political push-back, not least from deputies who otherwise claim to support reform but who fear loss of committee autonomy as the civil service re-engineers itself to be more joined up and able to provide holistic expert advice across government.

Unnoticed, however, this process is also looking to change the way deputies act and behave. Naturally, it’s not couched that way. But more clearly demarking policy from operational matters plus appointing committee secretaries and new ‘super civil servants’ called operations directors amounts to the same thing.

How? It’s a two-part process.

Firstly, the ops directors are to strengthen operational oversight in the priority areas of People (Health, Education, Employment & Social Security, plus Home Affairs) and Policy (Economic Development and Environment & Infrastructure) and to report back regularly on the performance of those service areas. Cards, in other words, will be marked.

Secondly, as we’ve already seen with Health & Social Care, committees themselves are to be independently performance tested. Again, it’s not expressed that way, but examining the good – or otherwise – governance of departments is a pretty useful benchmark of how well they’re doing.

For instance, by its own admission Home Affairs adopts a fairly adversarial approach with its senior team (or ‘holding to account’ if you prefer).

Since reviewer Professor Catherine Staite is of the view that ‘Essential elements of successful political leadership include the ability to continually seek knowledge, to develop trusting relationships and to empower others to fulfil their roles…’ you wonder how Home and some of the other departments will fare when they’re reviewed.

Perhaps the important point is that this is unequivocally about performance improvement.

As Professor Staite observes, ‘the individualistic, non-party political nature of Guernsey politics provides both opportunities and challenges. It enables deputies to follow their passions and express their own views without the constraints of party discipline.’

In turn, that also means States members don’t have the political support or development opportunities enjoyed by other parliamentary democracies or even members of UK local authorities.

She says: ‘This may be particularly disadvantageous to less experienced deputies when they become committee members, which is why it is so important to provide relevant and accessible learning resources to build skills, knowledge and self-confidence in relation to governance.’

As I said earlier, all about behaviours, attitude and working in partnership. Less Dave Jones and more Heidi Soulsby, if you will.

Hopefully you get the sense from this that significant changes are afoot but that the process also carries the risk of opposition as States members potentially lose the ability to behave exactly as they choose.

Perhaps that’s why the Code of Conduct Panel is so ineffective and so weak in setting boundaries of acceptable behaviour – or even adopting appropriate levels of transparency for itself.

This is all quite dense stuff yet there’s a third tectonic plate at work in this shifting political landscape: that of policy direction.

Economic Development president Charles Parkinson illustrated it neatly the other day on social media when he referred to the need to future-proof the island’s economic survival – itself a telling expression – which included dealing with rising sea levels.

‘The HydroPort scheme, just as an example, would protect the whole of the east coast. An extension [to St Peter Port Harbour] would do little in this regard.’

Significantly, in my view, he also added: ‘We need to be more ambitious.’

Yet the counter view was expressed by former Environment president Yvonne Burford, who said that if the company thought bandying around words like ‘sustainability’ and its flashy global credentials would win people over, they were sadly mistaken.

They were, she said, ‘spectacularly missing and misunderstanding the visceral concerns people have every time a project like this pops up’.

Faced with that, you do have to start questioning whether the island can, as Deputy Parkinson has it, survive economically.

By that I mean HydroPort has shown bold concepts exist that can address significant island issues, can be externally funded, and delivered privately, publicly or in varying degrees of partnership.

Yet instead of saying, ‘interesting, let’s test the proposition to see if it really works or can be improved’, the knee-jerk response by otherwise sensible people is to trash it, simply because they don’t like it.

No, it’s not rational, but this and the cri de coeur from the Guernsey International Business Association about connectivity issues pushing us towards becoming a satellite of Jersey, have exposed another political faultline: what sort of future do we want.

Deputy Parkinson is correct about economic survival. Given the skills, enthusiasm and commitment that exist in the private and public sectors, it ought to be assured.

Yet the divisions in this Assembly and, I suspect, those that will emerge in 2020, indicate how easy it will be to throw it away if we, our elected representatives and those voting for them believe success can be achieved by doing nothing.