It’s not often that I feel for politicians or senior civil servants but, boy, didn’t Dr Andy Sloan’s Scrutiny Management Committee give Policy and Resources’ leads on the Fiscal Policy Framework a right old mauling. The problem, unfortunately, was that vice-president Gavin St Pier and chief resources officer Bethan Haines deserved the slow-motion kicking they got.
I’ll spare you the details, as we’ve GST and other red meat to discuss, but under Sloan and Co.’s forensic dissection it quickly emerged that the framework is largely useless and ‘little more than wallpaper’, as one panel member described it.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the word-salad employed (the identical criticism I used last time about the Government Work Plan) the framework seeks to abandon a rules-based approach to managing Guernsey’s finances for a principles-based regime. And that means, as you’ve guessed, the States can do what they like with your money.
Why Scrutiny’s grilling was so important and so effective was because it innocently asked, why have you done that; how can you show it has worked? Amid the exchanged glances between the P&R reps and their audible gulps, answer came there none.
From two highly-skilled individuals, it was uncomfortable and revealing viewing.
Let’s get to the point. This is policy letter number two from a supposedly new and invigorated P&R that’s full of fine words but light or devoid of substance. If adopted by the States, both the framework and the GWP mean squadrons of officials and deputies can busy themselves doing things that won’t be measured, can’t be judged and have no targets to hit.
Just as everyone likes it – business as usual – and exactly the same system and level of accountability that failed to deliver the promised IT transformation yet burned through £42m. of your money. Which is why this shambolic, shameless and failing entity called the States of Guernsey is coming after you for more prop-up cash via GST.
Now, while I breathe deeply to try to lower my blood pressure, we need to acknowledge that the public sector can do good things, Storm Goretti and the Covid pandemic being the most recent. Give it a crisis, clear objectives and some deadlines and it responds well, heroically even.
But give it an island to run, an IT project to implement, a hospital extension to build or even collaborate with the private sector to build homes at Leale’s Yard and it all goes to hell.
And by going to hell, failing to deliver and spending freely, it takes on more staff. The latest is a £50,000 a year invasive non-native species policy and co-ordination officer. Seriously. When we’re broke.
Not even Environment can argue this is an essential post, but the appointment will be made and the diligent individual appointed will busy themselves making work for others and creating cost for taxpayers while failing to make any significant impact on populations of Obama nungara, Carpobrotus edulis or Vespa velutina*.
Why does government get the day-to-day so tragically wrong, so poorly directed? In a word, management. It’s ineffective, unfocused and unchallenged.
I make no criticism of individuals but the system basically means no one is in charge. That, plus a lack of detailed understanding caused by the removal of chief officers and what appears to be a total absence of accountability for performance (good or bad) means the whole structure seems set up to fail. And, you might say, appears to be doing so rather well.
So it’s no surprise to me that the States’ recently appointed IT tsar, Deputy Marc Laine, is proposing an amendment to the GWP which seeks to introduce the biggest shake-up of the leadership of the civil service in decades.
If you don’t know him, Deputy Laine has an excellent track record when it comes to technology, compliance, governance, ESG and business innovation, which is why P&R appointed him as its IT adviser. It’s his work in the depths of Frossard House and elsewhere seeking for answers to the Revenue Service and MyGov debacles that has led to the amendment.
As he told this newspaper last month: ‘My fear is that there are waves of further risks and issues that will follow on behind, and to a large extent they arise because of cultural and structural issues within management and the governance applied by the senior leadership team and politicians.’
Think about that, and you can see this for the crisis it is – and I use that word carefully. Step outside government for a moment, and in terms of revenues, assets and staffing, the States would barely creep in as a FTSE 250 small-cap business.
Yet could you imagine a finance director there remaining in place if £42m. had been wasted on a botched IT project that was vital for its future success?
Here, it was only uncovered because a particularly hands-on new CEO in Boley Smillie spoke to Revenue staff directly about why they were in such a mess. They told him. The managers hadn’t. The senior leadership team hadn’t. The IT department hadn’t flagged the issues.
Yet someone had signed off massive amounts of taxpayer money for either nothing at all or for a Revenue Service system Deputy Laine expects may well have to be scrapped. But no one is to blame, no one raised red flags and there’s no independent investigation into how this was allowed to happen.
Against this background of institutional failure and inability to perform, P&R is now steaming ahead with plans to force through GST when no one has any confidence in the States delivering, government has no plan for containing future costs and there’s no guarantee that the existing IT platforms can even cope.
Worse, we don’t know how much it’s going to cost to put right the current IT issues – warning: it will be tens of millions extra – or whether we even have the capacity and capability to do so.
Sorry, this is not the time to trust P&R that it will be all right on the night.
So the message from all this? Stop pretending, support the amendment, recognise the management crisis that government has and come back with GST only when islanders can trust you to implement it properly. And for the right reasons.
* A predatory land flatworm, sour fig and Asian hornet.
