Somewhere in the bowels of government the 2027 Budget is being put together, with committees making their cases, Policy & Resources looking at the numbers and no doubt an awful lot of people explaining why their particular bit of government simply cannot manage with a penny less.
We get to see the result in early October, but I find myself rather more interested in what happens before the numbers appear because, if a budget means anything, surely it ought to be where we decide what is important rather than simply work out how to pay for everything we have already decided to do.
I very much hope we aren’t going through the traditional exercise of starting with what we spent last year, adding inflation, adding increased staff costs, adding anything new we have thought of since and then calling the resulting number a budget. The Assembly has actually instructed P&R to establish a programme of zero-based budgeting, which in simple Horace language means forgetting for a moment what you spent last year and asking why you are spending it at all. P&R has chosen to approach this through something called priority-based budgeting, which may turn out to be excellent, although I find the name slightly amusing because priority-based budgeting rather depends upon knowing what your priorities are.
We do actually have priorities, of course. In fact we have gone one better and have super priorities – five of them – which are tax reform, Leale’s Yard, sustainable health and care, early years and families, and deciding what we are going to do about the harbours. The Assembly decided those were the things which should receive particular attention during this term and, as the Assembly is our executive, that ought to mean something when the money is being divided up. Otherwise I am not quite sure what the word super is doing there.
The difficulty comes when we leave the comfortable world of five headings on a piece of paper and start spending actual pounds. Where do cheaper buses sit against those super priorities? Where does subsidising Heathrow sit? Where does putting security fencing around schools sit, particularly when other school buildings need basic repairs? Where does changing the way traffic uses our narrow roads sit? I genuinely don’t know, and that is rather the point. If we are going to have priority-based budgeting, somebody surely has to tell us what priority all these perfectly worthy things actually have when they are competing for the same pound.
Perhaps that is what priority-based budgeting will do and I genuinely hope it does, because there is quite a difference between asking a committee what it needs next year and asking it what it would do if it were designing its services today with the money actually available. The former almost inevitably produces last year plus a bit more, while the latter might occasionally produce the deeply unfashionable conclusion that something government has been doing for years doesn’t need doing any more.
The trouble is that government doesn’t always seem to work like that. Individual committees have their mandates, their policies, their ambitions and sometimes their own sources of income, and before you know it a pound raised in one corner of government seems to have acquired a little label telling everybody where it is going to be spent.
Paid parking is a good example. I have no particular emotional attachment to free parking because I have never driven, so whether it costs £2 or £20 to leave a car somewhere doesn’t trouble me personally, although I suspect £20 might trouble quite a few other people. There may well be a perfectly good argument for charging people to leave private cars on valuable public land, but the suggestion that bothers me is that the money raised should then be used to subsidise buses.
Why?
If paid parking raises a million pounds, Environment & Infrastructure hasn’t earned a million pounds. The States of Guernsey has received a million pounds. There is a difference, and I think somewhere along the way we have rather lost sight of it.
Perhaps subsidising buses really would be the best thing we could do with that million, but I would quite like somebody to make that case against all the other things we could do with it. We have children needing additional educational support, an ageing population putting ever more pressure on health and care, public buildings which need maintaining and five super priorities which we have already said are super. There is also the extraordinary possibility, which doesn’t seem to get much of an airing in government, that we might decide not to spend the million at all.
I am increasingly attracted to a very simple rule. Committees don’t earn money. The States does. Every penny coming into government should go into general revenue and committees should receive the money the Assembly has decided they need through the Budget. By all means show in the accounts that a service costs £5m. and brings in £2m. because we need to know that, but don’t let the committee responsible start thinking the £2m. belongs to it and dreaming up what it can spend it on.
A committee should have a budget, not a bank account.
If a committee expects to spend £20m. and the activities it looks after are expected to bring in £5m., then its net call on general revenue is £15m. Fine. What I don’t want is the £5m. becoming its own little pot of money which somehow escapes the argument about whether somebody else needs it more. That is how committees start becoming little self-funding governments within government and how the Assembly loses control of spending without anybody ever formally deciding that it should.
The buses bring me to another little bee which has found its way into my bonnet. We seem increasingly keen on government encouraging us to travel in ways government approves of. Get out of the car, get on the bus, walk, cycle and generally be good boys and girls. There are perfectly sensible reasons for having a bus service and some people depend on it, but persuading somebody who already has a perfectly usable car to leave it at home is a rather different thing from making sure somebody without transport isn’t stranded.
I have never driven, which means I have spent more than 70 years doing my bit for Guernsey traffic congestion without even realising how virtuous I was. More recently I bought myself an electric trike and now potter around on that, which presumably ticks several fashionable transport boxes at once. Oddly enough nobody from E&I appeared at Old Farm with a cheque to subsidise it, nor do I think they should have done because I wanted an e-trike, I bought an e-trike and that seemed a perfectly satisfactory arrangement between me and my bank account.
If somebody wants to drive and is prepared to sit in the congestion which he and all the other drivers have collectively created, I am not entirely sure why government has to spend my money persuading him to do something else. I can already hear the objections because congestion affects buses, deliveries and emergency vehicles as well, so it isn’t quite as simple as that, but very little is. I would just like government to explain what problem it is spending our money to solve and where solving that problem sits against all the other problems waiting for the same money.
Which takes me, by a slightly crooked cow path, to Amherst School.
My father went to Amherst in 1916, I went there and my children went there, and somehow we all survived without the sort of security fencing which is now considered necessary. That doesn’t prove the fence isn’t necessary today because the world changes and perhaps the risks have changed as well, but I would quite like to know what changed and why it changed sufficiently to make this a spending priority now. This is particularly so when we know that elsewhere we have school buildings with deteriorating fabric and leaking windows.
The pound spent on the fence cannot also repair the window and, as John Gollop is rather fond of reminding us, you can’t have the penny and the bun. That doesn’t make the fence wrong, but it does mean somebody has to decide whether, right now, we need the fence or the window more, because that is what prioritising is supposed to mean.
Then there are pavements, which I hadn’t previously realised were quite so high on Guernsey’s list of things requiring political attention.
Ross Le Brun is very exercised about cars driving on them and I can understand why because cars and pedestrians are not an ideal mixture, although neither are cars and other cars when there isn’t enough road for them to pass. Guernsey has rather a lot of roads which were built when the principal traffic problem was probably whether two horses could squeeze past each other without one eating the hedge, and somehow we now have to fit SUVs, vans, buses, bicycles, pedestrians and everything else into exactly the same space.
For as long as I can remember, when two cars meet on one of our narrow roads and there is an empty pavement, one edges onto it and they pass. If somebody is walking there, the pedestrian gets priority and the car waits. It isn’t a perfect arrangement, but the interesting question is what replaces it.
We could make many more roads one-way, which would mean changing traffic flows around a road network which wasn’t exactly designed on a blank sheet of paper in the first place. We could have passing places, although on some roads the obvious way of creating one would be to remove a chunk of pavement, which would leave us in the splendid position of stopping cars driving on the pavement by removing the pavement so that cars can drive where it used to be.
Perhaps there is a better answer and perhaps Ross is right that we should change the practice, but before spending money doing it I would like to know how many people have actually been injured in Guernsey by cars mounting pavements specifically to pass another vehicle. I have tried to find that number and can’t. We have pedestrian casualty figures, but somebody hit crossing the road isn’t evidence that a car edging onto an empty pavement to pass another car is a major cause of injury.
None of which means it is safe. Driving on the road isn’t safe either. Life stubbornly refuses to arrange itself into things which are completely safe and things which are completely dangerous, however convenient that would be for writing policy papers. What matters is the relative risk, what the alternative is going to cost and, most importantly for this particular ramble, whether fixing it is more important than everything else we aren’t fixing.
We could throw Heathrow into the same pot. There may be very good reasons for spending public money maintaining a particular air connection and there may be very good reasons for spending public money encouraging people onto buses. One is hardly a net-zero policy and the other probably is, which is precisely why I don’t want this argument reduced to whether one likes environmental policies. I want both of them to have to stand in the same queue as health, education, leaking windows, additional educational needs, harbours, housing and everything else asking for money.
It occurs to me that what we really need is a committee which looks across the whole of government rather than being responsible for one particular corner of it. It could work out how much money we have, look at the competing demands, remember the priorities the Assembly has already agreed and then produce a policy letter setting out how it thinks our limited resources should be allocated. It wouldn’t actually decide any of this because that is the job of our executive, the States Assembly, whose members could debate it, amend it, throw bits out and ultimately decide what Guernsey’s priorities really are.
We would obviously need a name for this committee and, as it would be concerned with policy and resources, Policy & Resources might do.
There is a serious point hiding behind my sarcasm because I don’t want P&R turning itself into a cabinet and deciding everything for us. Quite the opposite. I want the Assembly to decide, but it can only properly do that if the competing choices are actually put in front of it. If parking money has already become bus money, another committee has its own income which it regards as its own spending money and other policies have acquired budgets almost by osmosis, quite a lot of prioritising has happened before our executive ever gets the chance to prioritise.
That is why I shall be interested in the Budget when it appears next month. Not simply in whether taxes go up or down, although naturally I shall manage to get excited about that as well, but in whether there is any sign that the money follows the priorities rather than the priorities following whichever committee happens to have found some money.
Almost everything government proposes can be made to sound worthwhile if you consider it on its own. The fence is worthwhile, the bus is worthwhile, Heathrow is worthwhile, safer pavements are worthwhile, fixing the window is worthwhile and providing better health and care is certainly worthwhile. Unfortunately the same pound keeps turning up in every argument.
John is right, we cannot have the penny and the bun.
Budget time is when our politicians are supposed to decide which one we are having.
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