My exploration of technical and project failures, and discussions with current and former senior civil servants, have given me a unique insight into our system.
I started with the presumption that the politicians simply were not asking the right questions. While that is part of the issue, I have seen the real problem first-hand.
Any board or committee is reliant on the quality of advice, choice of briefings, capability and insight provided by the executive – its officials who serve it. Executives whose roles and responsibilities and experience should be well-defined.
The structure, shape, board-level governance and adherence to standards provided by the States’ senior leadership team has not met even a modest standard. It has been more akin to a rabbit caught in headlights.
A committee or board that is not presented with accurate information, combined with considered choices, is doomed, or reliant on political subject matter experts if they exist on the committee or board. Whether it is structure or capability or both, we are all set up to fail over and over without having the right senior leadership team underpinning the aims of government and executing them effectively.
Guernsey’s civil service and political oversight has struggled under structural, cultural and operational dysfunction. We are now dealing with serious issues, decades in the making. The recent IT failures are only one symptom of a deeper problem – a lack of clarity, capability, adherence to standards and accountability in how projects and services are delivered.
More than £42m. has been wasted on failed transformation projects, with more bad news to come.
Decision-making is fragmented, accountability unclear, and leadership overstretched. The system now functions reactively, with huge knowledge and experience gaps, and is reliant on consultants to compensate for missing in-house capability.
It is poorly equipped to deal with today’s challenges using the same resources and structures that created the mess.
An example of structural weakness is provided by asking this: Who is the number two for our chief executive? The answer is that there is nobody trusted with that responsibility.
Leadership roles have remained static for a decade, and job descriptions discourage renewal or rotation. Meetings dominate time, but outcomes are scarce. Let me be crystal clear – our new chief executive, Boley Smillie, is fantastic and the right man for us to pin our hopes on, but we need to empower and support him.
While it would be convenient to blame a single person or department, the truth is that failure is collective and systemic, rooted in outdated political leadership roles and shortcomings in senior management, culture and governance.
This is not a call to impose ministerial government. Without the right supporting structure, that would also fail for the same reasons.
It is about having the right standards, governance and capabilities alongside management powers actively to manage and execute both policy and operational needs.
The expertise gap at committee and senior leadership team level – in governance, accountability, project delivery, and adherence to standards – has created a model incapable of delivering modern public services. The chief executive does not possess the powers typically associated with that role in other jurisdictions, leaving our service leader without all the tools to enforce change.
In the previous decade, restructuring led by previous chief executives reduced the senior leadership team from 13 to seven officers. Although this was intended to streamline decision-making and reduce silo thinking, instead it blurred lines of accountability and weakened leadership, transparency and delivery.
Senior officials and secretariat staff now serve multiple committees, spreading expertise thinly. This fragmentation means that no-one owns delivery outcomes, policy design occurs but implementation fails, and reliance on external consultants has become routine.
Work often gets to 80% but, without ownership to finish it, nothing gets done, and it’s Groundhog Day.
The treasury’s role as both funder and reviewer of projects has produced dual accountability and no ownership. Gateway reviews are viewed as mechanisms of control rather than support. The treasury often disowns projects that it originally initiated. The treasury marks the homework but disowns the failures.
In adopting the UK Treasury’s five-case model (known as the green book framework), Guernsey has replicated many of its worst flaws. The green book is the central guidance used by UK government departments to appraise and evaluate public spending decisions. However, the UK’s National Audit Office and HM Treasury’s own reviews have consistently found that, in practice, the green book is too long, too complex and inconsistently applied.
In 2021, an NAO review found the following: ‘Departments frequently apply the green book as a compliance exercise rather than a tool for designing value. The focus on quantifiable benefits encourages narrow appraisals that undervalue strategic and social outcomes.’
HM Treasury’s 2025 review admitted the following: ‘The green book process has become overly bureaucratic and misused as a hurdle rather than an enabler of effective decision-making.’
By importing the green book wholesale, Guernsey has inherited a flawed model which was always unsuited to small jurisdictions anyway. The framework consumes limited capacity, slows progress and discourages pragmatic decision-making. It fails in the UK and it fails here. We follow it slavishly, even when it makes no sense.
Scotland and Wales adapted the green book to create proportionate models for a small-scale or devolved context, emphasising strategic outcomes and simplified business cases to speed up decision-making. Guernsey should develop its own Guernsey business case framework, which would be shorter, outcome-focused, and suited to its scale.
More importantly, we need people in the senior leadership team with experience of delivering large projects. You can’t just drop in a project director and absolve yourself of responsibility.
Guernsey is currently running hundreds of projects with no clear prioritisation framework, leading to paralysis and silent project failure. Lessons from the UK Cabinet Office suggest that a single, centralised programme portfolio board, chaired by the chief executive, is essential to align priorities and stop waste.
A pervasive culture of control and compliance has replaced collaboration and empowerment. Departments compete rather than cooperate, undermining delivery. In other jurisdictions, reforms have shifted from a compliance-based culture to trust-based accountability, giving senior officials freedom to deliver within clear performance frameworks.
Guernsey’s structural, cultural and leadership failures take us towards a national crisis. More than £42m. has been wasted and vital services remain outdated or non-functional. This situation warrants urgent governance reform, with clear accountability, prioritisation and capability building. Without decisive action, we will remain trapped in a cycle of partial delivery, wasted spending and eroded public confidence.
Our chief executive needs a management team that operates to standards and is pragmatic, responsive, knowledgeable and dynamic. We need a senior leadership team structure that meets modern standards in terms of roles and responsibilities. Our committees and their presidents need high-quality departmental officials. Our senior committee, Policy & Resources, needs an empowered chief executive and a quality which today’s senior leadership team is not set up to deliver.
