Like most land disputes, the one at Fort Richmond headland had a long, tangled history.
But it boiled down to this. When the States sold Fort Richmond in 2019, it also sold with it a substantial portion of the Allez family’s home without telling them, despite accepting for many years that they were the rightful owners and repeatedly agreeing to redraw obsolete boundary maps to reflect that reality.
The States has never adequately explained why it suddenly stabbed the family in the back. Two court cases have been withdrawn, essentially in the family’s favour, before the committees and officials involved might have been forced to disclose documents revealing their reasons.
The most innocent explanation is that the tortuous sale of the fort, at the knockdown price of £1m. four years after it was put on the market for £2m., was at risk of falling through, and so the States, muddled and panicking, went ahead in the absurd, forlorn hope that the boundary mess it left behind would be resolved by the new neighbours.
For more than six years, the States insisted on defending its indefensible actions. It behaved legally, it kept saying, disregarding that it had also behaved unethically or at the very least unreasonably. Asked to explain, it was slippery and obstructive and more than once it pushed the boundaries of truthfulness to breaking point.
Bizarrely, even now, some officials would have preferred to continue along this path. Let the Allez family challenge us in court, they kept advising. After all, if it went wrong, the taxpayer would fund it, and politicians would take the rap. Oh, how easy it is to be casual with other people’s money and reputation.
A week before Christmas, Policy & Resources president Lindsay de Sausmarez decided she had seen enough of this disdainful, irresponsible approach, and more or less unilaterally took matters into her own hands. She drove to Perelle, or in her case cycled probably, and met the Allez family face to face, knowing she had the support of her similarly pragmatic chief executive and could rely on her largely united committee.
Two conversations and three weeks later, a deal was done to end the dispute.
By personally intervening and, unlike her predecessors, acting thoughtfully against the guidance of the bureaucratic machine, Deputy de Sausmarez has swiftly repaired a flagrant misjustice and saved taxpayers the unquantifiable financial risk of litigation.
This is far from the first story of its type.
Deputy de Sausmarez started last year fixing the pickle her officials put her in at the bathing pools. She ended it fixing the pickle they put her in at Fort Richmond. Some other deputies could point to their own similar cases.
Those uppity advisers, timorous politicians and naive consultants who insist that deputies must contain themselves to policy-making, and that operational matters should always be left to officials, could not be more wrong.
A good deputy needs to be able to fix things.
