‘There is no accountability for the States or its committees’

I was staggered to read the report of Deputy Gavin St Pier’s update on the myGov investigation to the States on Wednesday 22 April. It reminded me of the blatant propaganda and barefaced disinformation put out during the days of Soviet Russia and subsequently under Putin. Although, to be fair, the White House is no better at the moment. To be clear, Deputy St Pier recommended the policy letter proposing that States IT services, including the myGov and revenue projects be outsourced to Agilisys to the States in June 2019. This is a matter of public record in the Hansard for 19 June 2019. He may have even have written the policy letter, but if not, he certainly approved it as a member of Policy & Resources and will have been involved in the building the case for the outsourcing and the procurement of Agilisys.

It beggars belief that he spoke as if the outsourcing was nothing to do with him or the committee. He also said on TV that he was no longer in office after the election which took place shortly after the outsourcing decision and therefore had nothing to do with the subsequent events.

Nothing to do with me Guv! The decision took place in June 2019 and the election took place in October 2020. That's 15 months during which one would have expected him and the committee to establish procedures for the political governance of the outsourcing. Indeed, quite apart from the outsourcing, IT services form part of Corporate Services for which the P&R Committee has ongoing responsibility and therefore regular reporting to the committee should have been happening as a matter of course. It was also shocking to read that senior civil servants involved in the outsourcing were exempted from disciplinary action, leaving no legitimate means of ensuring adequate job performance and hence the successful delivery of the project. I hope that financial inducements for successful completion of the exercise were not offered and, if they were, they were not paid.

One of the glaring omissions of the report is that there is no clear mention of the role of the P & R Committee, other than the introduction of quarterly reporting in 2021 which was requested by the committee.

Should one assume that the committee did not exercise any governance in the absence of any reference to that in the report? Or was the P&R oversight simply inadequate and therefore omitted? Or did the committee not allow Mr Smillie to consider their role at all? I have already pointed out that he had a clear conflict of interest as a employee of the States. Whatever the case might be, the committee of the time and the subsequent version failed.

Mr Smillie looks considerably older and more care-worn these days compared to when he took the Post Office by storm as a fresh-faced boy. I wonder if the enormity of his commitment to prevent anything like Agilisysgate occurring again has hit him.

It is a relief to read that Deputy Marc Laine is advising the P&R Committee. Oh that we had more deputies with his knowledge and acumen. He appears to know what he is talking about. However, I fear that in the absence of a recognition of culpability by Deputy St Pier and an acceptance that the then and subsequent P&R Committee failed to exercise proper governance, lessons will not be learned and the same mistakes will be made all over again.

I will also state again that the real root of the problem is our election system and related machinery of government.

The P&R committee itself has advised me that the States as a whole and each committee has collective responsibility for all of their actions under our current system of government. Yet, there is absolutely no sign of the members of the P&R committees from 2019-2025 still serving today (St Pier 2016-2020, Helyar 2020-2023 and Gollop 2023-2025) resigning.

In other words, the reality is that there is no accountability for the States or its committees. So, it doesn’t matter how much anyone stamps their feet or complains about the loss of £42m. no politician is going to accept responsibility.

Good luck Mr Smillie.

Richard Corbin