Let me start by saying Peter Roffey is wrong. Civil servants do run the show. Admittedly, his neatly argued piece in this newspaper was rather more nuanced, talking about governing the island and keeping deputies under their thumb – which they don’t. But fundamentally they do run the island. What’s the point of having them otherwise?
They’re employed to put into action all the marvellous things various States have decided we want or need and do so with a diligence that is at once tenacious and suffocating.
It’s why decisions taken a decade ago, and thus hopelessly out of date, are still pursued through the bottleneck that is the legislative department of the crown officers and why laws, once enacted, are executed to the minutest degree for maximum off-the-scale mission creep.
A favourite example is the civil servant who decreed that a historic granite wall at the triangle field site opposite Alliance had to be pulled down for a few metres of pavement to be installed. It was of no practical use and didn’t link any other footpaths (there are none in Les Mares Pellees) but policy is to extend footpaths so we damn well will.
The lunacy, and expense, was happily prevented by a planning tribunal but it’s a vivid illustration of civil service-think and the mission creep I mentioned. We can faff about with a meaningless footpath but can’t be bothered to resolve the traffic jams along the front that the Admiral Park traffic lights were going to, er, cure.
Which is why Deputy Marc Laine’s quote, also in this newspaper, that ‘Without an exceptional [senior management team], good politicians will fail. They will make decisions based on flawed advice, pursue strategies that look coherent on paper and fail in practice, and defend outcomes in public that they privately cannot explain,’ was so significant.
He was talking ahead of publication of the report into the MyGov IT train crash. As he says, ‘When that report lands it will make painful reading, not just for those directly involved, but for anyone who cares about public confidence in government’s ability to deliver. And it will not arrive in isolation.’
Yes, there’s worse to come as it will drop alongside the failures of the tax system and the well-documented disaster of the IT outsourcing programme. As Deputy Laine says: ‘Together these are not isolated incidents. They are a pattern, and patterns tell stories.’
In summary, civil servants run the island, some are doing so very badly* and politicians have demonstrated their complete inability to prevent these disasters happening on their watch.
This is bad enough. But it comes with a host of other embedded problems – government running out of money, the number in work and paying taxes falling while the number not in work and needing support is growing, young people leaving for better prospects and affordable housing, plus a flatlining economy.
That last prompted Economic Development to commission its Finance Sector Growth Strategy 2035 and that has now been joined by a separate, but associated, paper, Guernsey Reimagined – The Innovation Report by locally-based INOS and drawn from all manner of credible sources.
You’ll have seen the headlines. Future of finance in the islands in doubt. Burning platform. Retirement island for the rich, etc, etc. As the document itself says, it contains difficult findings ‘because honest diagnosis is the prerequisite for effective action’. Something, we note, that has been totally absent to date.
It goes on: ‘The ask is not for government to do more, but for the system around decision-making to be redesigned so that good intent converts into faster outcomes.’ That is a perceptive and on-target analysis of the States of Guernsey’s biggest weakness – its inability to get things done for the right reason and in a timely, cost-effective manner.
It’s also important to note something else the innovation report says: ‘These findings are not a critique of government intent – the States of Guernsey carries one of the hardest governance briefs in Europe, managing a sovereign economy with the resource base of a mid-sized town.’
And that resource comment is critical because it underpins everything. Guernsey’s future hangs on people of ability – in both the private and public sectors. It doesn’t have enough of its own and is dependent on attracting those it needs here. And can’t, as the report makes clear, because of past States’ inability or unwillingness to deliver on its housing action plans.
Pulling the plug on Omnibus Investments’ worked-up and costed plan for 300-plus homes at Leale’s Yard can now be seen as yet another part of ‘patterns telling stories’ referred to by Deputy Laine.
The innovation report covers a lot of ground – including appalling levels of complacency within the system. The ‘everything’s fine… we’ve always done it this way… no need to change…’ approach adopted following the global crash in 2008 and again after the Covid pandemic. Yet the need for change, for doing things very differently, is now even more pressing.
As the report says, ‘Across every sector, the conversations converged on urgent structural realities: the rapid adoption of Al, the inevitability of blockchain and asset tokenisation, and the urgent need for infrastructure automation.’ In short, adapt or die.
Here, however, complacency rules. ‘The data reveals a two-speed ecosystem: global firms are innovating by absolute necessity, while much of the local economy innovates by permission, bottlenecked by legacy systems and structural decision-making processes that struggle to match private sector pace,’ it says.
That’s putting it diplomatically. The hugely successful restoration of the bathing pools (Vive La Vallette) with external partners came within days of being abandoned because of civil service and political inertia.
And, yes, almost all of that lay at the door of the senior management team that Deputy Laine says needs to be of exceptional quality to avoid political failure (one high-profile deputy was involved too), so Leale’s Yard and Agilisys aren’t isolated instances.
Deputy Laine has suggested some solutions and States chief executive Boley Smillie will reveal more of his own when his MyGov findings are published. It should all make interesting reading.
Meanwhile, just as the need for innovation, for doing things differently has never been greater, we will be relying in large part on those who got us into this mess in the first place to find a way out.
Hmm.
*Please see my earlier column.
