Mark Helyar: ‘The whole system simply isn’t fit for purpose’

Moving to the ‘backbenches’ this term gave me a different lens into the way in which our government operates and how the political realm and public service interact. It’s not always easy to identify or examine a big problem when you are standing too close to it.

There is tangible mistrust in Guernsey politics and obvious frustration at our joint political inability to effect even small changes in the things which government does, or how it does them. Many politicians also feel this frustration.

The big question which has been troubling me is: If politics cannot achieve anything despite us all agreeing on a big issue, such as the fact that we have a real housing crisis, then, inexperience and incompetence aside, there must surely be a more significant issue at play within our system?

Looking at the game from the subs’ bench, it has become clear to me that we have collectively, over a long period, simply drifted into becoming players in a Guernsey political squid game.

The root cause is that most of our authority is delegated and we are kept remote from the actual decision-making, whilst being simultaneously buried in unnecessarily long and often pointless policy documents, complex processes, tenuous legal issues and tedious debate, topped off with a constant barrage from the media and social media.

If we stand back from this and look at what is really going on, politicians are not driving the bus of public services, we are to a large extent simply looking out of the window whilst being driven somewhere many of us do not want to go and the public also never asked to be taken.

I was delighted to read that the new head of the civil service is putting accountability at the top of his agenda. He is right. But reform needs to go much further. Our political relationship with the public service needs a fundamental reset. That should be part modernisation and empowerment, part assuming more risk, part changes in process and government structure, and dare I say it, part freedom to exercise initiative and create incentivisation within the service.

More fundamentally, given our parlous financial circumstances, politicians must become leaders in substance as well as form if they are to be held responsible and accountable to the public. We must be driving the bus.

So where do I think we should start? A constitution requires a clear founding principle. In ministerial meetings in England and Wales, the chief adviser will confirm that there is nothing ‘novel, contentious or repercussive’ to report. These three words completely describe the proper boundary between public administration and politics and where I believe it now needs to be reset – the clear understanding being that all matters falling within that definition, whatever delegated authorities might exist, are political in nature and need to be escalated for political guidance.

In Guernsey, very contentious things can be done at the moment without any political awareness because of the concept of delegated authority, sometimes granted decades before, where public servants act independently in the name of their committee.

I could give several recent examples but that would require me to fall into the trap of playing the squid game again by restarting a political blame cycle, so I’m not going to. Some of the issues I could cite might appear individually superficial or trivial but they lie at the heart of this problem – they result from delegated authorities across committee mandates morphing into new policies, processes and outcomes nobody asked (or voted) for, and which we cannot now afford to fund. The system often justifies this by using imported examples of (usually expensive) best practice elsewhere – ‘We need to do [X] because that’s what they do in [insert jurisdiction]’. We simply cannot afford a government which self-generates new responsibilities for itself in this way.

In this political and managerial vacuum, it only needs one official, acting without clear guidance or supervision, to be ever so slightly more ideological, disproportionate or risk averse than is desirable, or to misunderstand the purpose of their role, for a problem to start to develop quietly and for some new rules, regulations or hurdles to be created, some new forms or an expensive or time-consuming survey or consultation needing to be completed, and in turn for costs to rise and some part of our society, culture or economic activity to be stifled or for people just to give up. I could give you many, many examples.

And this is why I believe the issue has been so difficult for me and others to identify. It is not one thing but legion. It is a system imperceptibly growing in all directions simultaneously because it lacks central, executive management and cohesion, both at a political and service level, and politics has become largely irrelevant to its operations because of the wholesale delegation of authority.

Our political system is similarly lacking in cohesion because it is impossible to revert to a committee of 40 for debate over every decision. The whole system simply isn’t fit for purpose, top to bottom.

If I am re-elected to the States, I intend to stand for the role of ‘chief minister’ – president of the Policy & Resources Committee. My primary aim, whether I succeed in being appointed or not, will be to galvanise and inspire all politicians to work together with the public service on starting to reset our relationship and providing this much-needed cohesion. I believe it is critical to improving public trust in our government and bringing its growth under control.

I aim to achieve this by working with colleagues and with the leadership team to help drive positive organisational and cultural change, implement clear delegation and decision-making lines, and supporting the team in ensuring accountability and transparency throughout the public service.

I believe this should be formed around a new set of constitutional principles setting out how delegated authorities must operate, what standards are expected and clear red lines for decision making. I will expand on what I believe these should be during the election period.

This doesn’t involve bashing the service or its staff. It means empowering people by setting clear guidelines, improving confidence and morale, identifying and reinforcing best practice, adopting it as standard and monitoring performance against tangible goals as well as the proper allocation of finite resources. It also means acting (and therefore sometimes failing) faster, and iterating small improvements rather than as at present, which is a cumbersome stop-start process which tries very slowly to curate perfect outcomes which we can never achieve.

We need to provide the leadership required to help our politicians focus on the role of supervising decision-making rather than infighting and help them provide more effective challenge in their committee roles, ensuring that we are enabling a ‘can do’ culture where everyone is invested in the provision of cost-effective public services which we can all be proud of.

This requires, above all, vision and effective and inspiring political leadership from the top, whoever is eventually elected to the ‘chief minister’ role. Whatever the outcome, I will continue to contribute and serve the island of my birth to the best of my ability.