Before we get into the meat of what’s going to be a bit of a heavy one this week, here’s an amusing question for you. Are the members of Policy & Resources, as Scrutiny’s enfant terrible Andy Sloan suggested over the weekend, mildly mad? True, he meant it in the context of the will it/won’t it be GST-plus, no GST, or, as we now know, GST-lite. But the challenge stands nevertheless.
And not just because P&R’s messaging was barmy by any standards. I mean, what the actual..? Playing peekaboo with something as serious as imposing a new tax on people’s shopping, heating, eating and clothing bills is a bit unhinged even if done skilfully. Which it wasn’t.
And so we neatly come on topic – does the island really know what it’s doing any more?
Those of us with a few miles on the clock can remember the island being pretty sure-footed as it rebuilt after the Occupation, introduced modern social services, improved public infrastructure, lived within its means, avoided borrowing, encouraged self-sufficiency and dealt with the booms and busts of both tourism and horticulture.
Then finance brought unexpected wealth and runaway government expansion, followed by the great revenue giveaway that was zero-10, designed to hold onto most of that industry. And, since then, the wheels have pretty much fallen off. I won’t rehearse all the recent IT disasters but the latest last week on the debacle that is now the PEH redevelopment and patient records projects, plus the inability of government even to collect income tax efficiently, force you into some uncomfortable conclusions.
Because these headlines do not reflect isolated administrative problems. They flag wider concerns about accountability, institutional capability, the island’s governance structures, and the ability of Guernsey’s political system to manage and scrutinise increasingly complex modern-state functions.
And it’s that last one that really bothers me. Do we have the skills and ability to keep a tiny rock of 65,000 people afloat as an autonomous, self-governing community with an international financial services centre bolted on? Or the money?
I was going to say ‘still’ have the skills and ability, but that would be misleading. What if we never had them? What if we’re as good or bad as we ever were but the tasks we’re dealing with have progressed beyond our capabilities?
This isn’t about we thick voters putting the wrong people in the States or the lack of executive government or constitutional failure. Put simply, it’s administrative complexity. You don’t have to be a brilliant deputy or bureaucrat to manage an island making its living from sunlight, water, nutrients and exporting the resulting tomatoes.
But modern government has become vastly more technically demanding than it was when Guernsey’s constitutional structures evolved from 1948 onwards. When, for instance, Home Secretary Chuter Ede was busily working on the Alderney agreement with Guernsey, life was very different. The fact that the UK home secretary had time to worry about Alderney when post-war Britain was bust and still had food rationing speaks volumes.
But back then, who was worried about – and this is not an exhaustive list – digital systems and IT, healthcare, pensions, regulation, cyber security, financial compliance, housing policy, infrastructure, procurement, taxation, climate change, or the island meeting its international obligations? Remember, we’ve just spent an extra £30m. (£700 per taxpayer) on getting through Moneyval and that one hurdle was merely a fragment of the cost and complexity of remaining self-governing.
I said at the start that this week’s is a bit of a heavy one, so apologies as we go a bit deeper. Because what I’m really pushing here is whether our current governance model – the States, however you define government – is up to meeting this modern complexity.
The post-1948 democratic process was based on small districts and electors having a pretty close knowledge of the candidates. That’s been replaced by island-wide voting and I think it’s fair to say most acknowledge that’s not been a success.
Irrespective, islanders’ faith and trust in the political process is eroding – with no little justification – and politicians’ willingness and ability to control the size and cost of their operations is limited. I put it no more strongly.
Overall, however, while the island remains pretty stable, it is drifting to the left and increasing islanders’ dependency on it without clear electoral authority for that, while failing to deliver on essentials like cost of living, improving real incomes or affordable housing.
At the same time, the problem of institutional capability may be even more acute than political adequacy. By that, I mean at the highest levels. No reflection on the hundreds who deliver daily, but whether the island can retain a sufficiently capable permanent civil service elite to deliver the complex projects – hospital, IT, GST – that it needs.
I think we all agree that modern public administration is increasingly professionalised and technical and that we have to compete widely for talent. That’s despite also facing housing pressures, recruitment difficulties, relatively small career ladders and, as recently demonstrated, serious questions about whether senior leadership is properly incentivised to deliver what the island needs and has set in motion.
Look at that more closely and what are we actually saying? That for ‘the States’ to be effective, to do the things it says it will, it needs expertise, the ability to execute at speed, strategic continuity of purpose, effective procurement and joined-up delivery. All of which have been shown to be missing over recent crucial periods.
When the president of Health & Social Care refuses to say how badly they’ve overspent on the hospital project, you know we’ve pretty much hit rock bottom.
I referred to institutional overstretch the other week, and classic examples of that are delayed projects, inconsistent execution, strategic drift, procurement failures, reactive policy-making, dependency on external advisers and massive cost over-runs. Oh my god, how Guernsey ticks those boxes.
In summary then, do we have the capacity to keep Guernsey as a free standing independent island or are we inevitably drifting towards becoming offshore Hampshire? This isn’t academic or scaremongering. It’s something Alderney should have been asking 60 years ago but didn’t, because it had this island to bail it out. So now a commission is asking on its behalf.
Unlike Alderney, we don’t have the luxury of an external benefactor. And while there are solutions to the issues I’ve raised here, they’re available only to those who seek them. Yet despite the stark findings of the MyGov governance failure, we’ve yet to hear these multiple alarms or react to them.
So perhaps we really don’t know what we’re doing – or how to ask the right questions – any more.
