The Committee for Housing has published its work plan for the term, and to be clear the Housing Committee is not my target. The plan is an honest document, and that honesty is exactly what makes it valuable, because it shows us, in plain print, the full size of what the government of Guernsey has collectively decided to attempt.
It publishes a pipeline of roughly 618 affordable homes to the end of 2030 and then, unusually for a government paper, discounts its own optimism, weighting each site by the probability it actually gets built and arriving at an expected total of 484. It admits that this will not meet the island’s assessed need of 976 affordable homes over the same period.
Half. The most that one committee – given the mandate and means the States chose to give it – can promise, is half of what the island’s own evidence says is required.
Sit with that for a moment, because it is not a committee’s shortcoming. It is a whole government’s choice.
The States declared housing the defining priority of this term, then handed the priority to a single committee and sized the effort to that committee’s reach. Everything conditional in the document, the sites awaiting States’ approval in the autumn, the feasibility studies not yet commissioned, the delivery vehicle still being chosen, and the funding parked behind the tax debate, sits on top of that ceiling, not beneath it.
And beneath even the conditionals lies a softer foundation still, because much of the pipeline depends on private developers choosing to buy sites and build social housing for the committee to purchase. That asks a construction industry already stretched to its limits, short of labour and squeezed on materials, to volunteer for the work it finds least attractive, since the margins on social housing are thin where they exist at all.
The plan’s own probability discounts quietly concede the point, but the plain reading is more blunt – it is entirely conceivable that a meaningful share of even the 484 will simply never be built, because the delivery model rests on the commercial appetite of an industry that has none to spare. Those are the reasons even the half might not arrive. The half itself is the ambition, and it is the ambition of the entire Assembly, not of the deputies and officers doing their best inside it.
Now hold the plan up against the other document government published this summer, the Household Expenditure Survey, because the two belong together, but nobody in the States has yet put them side by side. The survey tells us that between 2018 and 2024 the real incomes of islanders fell by 12% while their real spending fell by only 6%.
That gap is not resilience. It is erosion. It is savings drawn down, debt taken on, corners cut, and the statisticians know it, because for the first time they added questions about making ends meet, about savings, about non-mortgage borrowing, and for the first time they carved housing costs out from all other spending so they could be watched separately. A survey does not grow those questions by accident. It grows them because the people answering it are describing an island living beyond its shrinking means, with its largest and least escapable cost sitting in the middle of the household budget like a stone.
This is the backdrop against which a plan for half measures asks to be judged, and it is why the shortfall is not a housing statistic. Let me put the claim plainly, because it is the claim on which everything else in this piece rests. Housing is the theory of everything on this island. The staffing crisis, the wage spiral, the strained public finances and the steady departure of young families are not four problems demanding four strategies. They are one problem wearing different costumes, and the problem underneath every costume is that we have not built enough homes. If that sounds too neat, look at where the evidence sits.
The 12% is the teacher weighing a Guernsey salary against a Guernsey rent and choosing the departure lounge. It is the £5m. a year in relocation grants and subsidies, the wage demands that arrive because pay must chase rent, the tax base quietly thinning as earnings flow to landlords instead of the local economy. Every one of those pressures is downstream of the same shortage, and every one compounds while supply lags.
Nowhere is the chain more complete, or more expensive, than in health. Follow it link by link, because every link is on the public record. Health & Social Care has run at hundreds of vacancies against its budgeted workforce, and its own president has told the Assembly that the most significant barrier to filling them is not pay but accommodation.
The committee has budget for more people than it can recruit; the money sits there while the posts sit empty, because the people it needs cannot afford to live here. So the gaps get plugged with agency staff, at one point over 150 of them costing nearly £12m. in a single year, paid on average 30% more than the permanent staff they stand in for before agency fees, travel and lodging are counted, some of them housed in hotels at a further cost of £800,000 a year.
HSC’s own leadership has said that swapping the agency workers used in just five months for permanent employees would have saved £4m. over the remainder of that year. And the damage does not stop at the invoice. The medical director has linked bed-blocking directly to the inability to recruit care staff, which means the housing shortage is now measured in occupied hospital beds and lengthening waiting lists, in care the island cannot deliver to its own people.
One deputy has even warned that the rent allowances paid to keep agency staff housed are themselves inflating the rents that price out permanent recruits and local families. The shortage creates the vacancy, the vacancy summons the contractor, the contractor’s rent allowance deepens the shortage. Islanders pay three times over, in subsidies, in premium staffing costs, and in the quality of their own care, and the machine feeds itself. A plan that closes half the gap does not halve any of this. It guarantees the other half continues, year after year, with interest.
Nowhere is that inheritance more visible than in the argument currently consuming the island, because the GST debate is a housing debate wearing a tax costume. Think through what the theory actually implies about it. Had the States delivered adequate supply over the past two decades, instead of averaging 100-odd homes a year against a need of 300, houses today would be markedly cheaper, rents would not be devouring earnings, and the average household would hold real spare income.
Against that island, a consumption tax would be what it is in most places, an unwelcome but survivable argument about percentages. Against this island, it is asking people who have already surrendered their slack to their landlords to find money that no longer exists.
The fury over GST is not really about the tax. It is the sound of a population with nothing left to give being asked to give more, and the reason there is nothing left is a supply failure the States authored one undelivered year at a time.
Government made GST controversial decades before it proposed it. And the irony completes itself in this very work plan, where the funding for housing delivery sits parked behind the outcome of the tax debate. The crisis that emptied islanders’ pockets is now the obstacle to taxing them, and the tax fight is in turn the obstacle to fixing the crisis. The failure is blocking its own cure, twice.
And here is the thing the plan cannot say, because the government it belongs to has never said it. Read every States publication on this crisis and you will find it described in one register only, as a housing problem, owned by a housing committee, measured in units and tenures and site yields. That framing was itself a decision.
The States looked at a problem bleeding into health, education, social security and the tax base, and chose to box it inside a single mandate, as if the recruitment failures and the agency bills and the departing families would politely wait inside the same box.
Nowhere does government acknowledge what its own spending already proves, that this is a staffing crisis, a wage crisis, a public finance crisis and a slow demographic bleed, all wearing the same costume. That silence is not cosmetic. It is the reason the response is the size it is.
Hand a committee a narrow mandate and it will produce a plan sized to that mandate, and by that measure 484 homes against a need for 976 reads as brave realism, the most one committee could honestly promise. But the problem was never committee-sized. If housing is what the figures say it is, the root system under half the government’s cost pressures, then no single committee, however well led, could ever be the whole answer, and expecting one to be is not a strategy at all. It is managed decline with a delivery schedule, authored not by the Committee for Housing, but by every deputy who voted housing the priority and then declined to treat it as one.
That admission is important, not because the island needs another report. Governments size their responses to the problems they have named, and a crisis named narrowly gets a narrow answer. The point of admitting the wider damage is not to commission a study of it. The evidence is already scattered across the budget lines, the Scrutiny transcripts and the survey returns of every committee in the building. The point is what the admission compels. Every one of those committees, Health & Social Care, Education, Employment & Social Security, Policy & Resources, is already paying for the failure through its own mandate, which means every one of them owns a share of the solution, and their silence lets the whole burden rest on the one committee least equipped to carry it alone.
So the ask is simple, and it is not for paper. Make increasing housing supply the top priority of the government of Guernsey. Not a priority among priorities, not the defining theme of a press release, but the thing to which every committee, every budget line and every spare hour of officer time bends until the shortage breaks.
That means combined effort across the whole of the States, rather than one mandate carrying the load.
It means genuine innovation in how homes get built, not politeness about the methods that have delivered 100-odd homes a year for a decade. And above all it means diversifying the routes to delivery, opening channels that do not depend on the appetite of a stretched industry for thin margin work, including giving islanders themselves the right to build, so that supply is never again hostage to a single delivery model that we can already see failing.
The survey has told us what the next few years look like if nothing changes – incomes falling faster than families can trim their spending, the gap filled from savings and debt until both run out. Nothing in this work plan changes that arithmetic, and every future argument the States wants to have with its people, over GST or whatever tax follows it, will be had with a population the housing failure has already bled, and will be lost for the same reason.
An island cannot save its way out of a shortage, a government cannot tax back money its own failure removed from the household purse, and a crisis this size cannot be delegated. Until supply sits at the top of the whole government’s agenda, the theory of everything keeps its grip, and the drag on our society is not a risk to be weighed. It is the schedule we have published.
