Thank you for asking but, yes, I am perfectly well. Never better really. And, yes, I am completely serious in offering a vote of thanks to Policy & Resources for steering the island through its convoluted – and probably not yet finished – debate on introducing GST.
Close your mouth at the back there. We are not codfish and can deal with mild surprise in a more adult fashion than gaping. For genuinely, those who stuck their heads above the parapet to usher in the tax reforms really do deserve a pat on the back for having done so. Abstainers take note.
I mean, why would any otherwise sane or rational individual put themselves through the stress, effort and abuse as P&R did – particularly its president, Lindsay de Sausmarez and vice-president Yvonne Burford – simply for being elected to the wrong committee at the wrong time?
Look back at some of the social media comments and they were deeply personal, hurtful and, frankly, misogynistic. The blokes on P&R, including Charles Parkinson who went from opposing GST to praising it to the skies, got off pretty much scot-free.
Yet Lindsay has variously been – and these are the more printable – cow, bitch, snake, liar, Starmer (yes, really), idiot and smug. Despite it all she was there at the protest bus meeting last week as a mum and passenger when the very people responsible for the currently collapsing service, Environment & Infrastructure, weren’t. Go figure as they say.
But before you worry I’m going soft on government, there’s a particular purpose to this, which I’ve been developing for a while now. The first is the difficulty we have in government doing anything remotely controversial. Even building accommodation for nurses next to the, er, hospital.
The second is in attracting what many of you would regard as candidates of the necessary calibre to take the difficult decisions needed to get the island’s finances back on track and build affordable homes for locals.
The third, which in my view speaks most closely to the calibre issue, is how to make States members effective in everything that they do. At a time when the system means they are effectively powerless.
Put it this way. Asked some years ago if a colleague could act as a CI Air Search volunteer, my reply was an emphatic yes. Value of individual’s input high; disruption to Guernsey Press potentially low and, in any event, manageable.
Imagine the CEO of MegaCorp (Gsy) PLC similarly being asked to release a high-flier for service to the community in the States of Guernsey and that value proposition is totally reversed. And then some. Before you factor in the abuse and reputational risk attached to being a States member.
Don’t believe me? Ask Marc Laine. Nine months after the Assembly unanimously instructed P&R and its CEO to make civil service reform an absolute priority, he and amendment backer Mark Helyar are still waiting to hear how that’s going to happen. If at all, which is why they’ve threatened to go nuclear on it.
Read the 2027 budget – a Pillar Two tax windfall document in an austerity wrapper – and you could weep. Options A and B, effectively immediate modest expenditure restraint vs. more spending now in exchange for a larger savings target later, exist simply because the only thing in control of the States is the States. So no one is.
Consider this as a current member of P&R, or as a potential candidate in 2029, when we hold the next general election. Having endured all the name-calling and venom of the anti-GST lobby on the steps of the Royal Court, you know that a deeply unpopular new tax isn’t going to – cannot possibly, even on your own official figures – resolve the island’s slow-burn financial crisis.
Look at that more closely and the budget indicates the adults in the States are finally starting to acknowledge government’s existing spending commitments cannot be met by underlying revenues, but that same government has yet to show it can bring expenditure under control in a sustainable or effective way.
This tension is apparent throughout the budget document but there’s a further, unacknowledged, problem. The States, committees, the Assembly – call it what you will – cannot reduce the amount and cost of the ‘government’ it provides without reducing demand.
Yes, there are some initiatives like priority-based budgeting that could touch on this and there are other policy-based attempts like spend-to-save in the mix too. But, and this is crucial, there is little evidence that members will deliver these jam-tomorrow economies at anything like the scale required.
Rather the reverse. Experience from the 2009 so-called Financial Transformation Programme, when States’ finances were under not dissimilar pressures, is far from encouraging. Then the aim was taking £32m. out of baseline budgets. As Deputy Parkinson told me a couple of years ago, ‘We got to £27m., but regrettably that was largely achieved by shifting costs to the public, rather than driving through efficiencies.’
Better luck this time, eh?
The serious point, however, is that bigger and worse decisions than GST lie ahead and, as yet, no serious proposals exist for trying to make the States more effective at implementing anything it says it will do.
Delivery, in short, is optional while failure remains blame- and consequence-free. Again, don’t believe me? Just look at the project to extend the hospital with new theatres and maternity facilities, which was embarrassingly and expensively abandoned on cost grounds last month.
Where’s the inquiry? Where’s the instruction to preserve and secure all the documentation relating to the modernisation scheme for a full audit of who knew what and when the project was going south? What meetings were there, and with whom, giving the first indications that it was going off the rails and what was done about it?
How, in short, could a £260m. organisation like Health & Social Care get it so wrong and who’s to blame?
We had that soul-searching for the MyGov/IT debacle but, unless I’ve missed it, not for this latest failure. Where’s the routine post-implementation review of expenditure on a value for money and objectives-achieved basis?
So members of P&R oversee a system over which they have little control and which has no embedded culture of challenging its performance or questioning delivery of policy objectives. At the same time they generally get the blame for everything that – inevitably – goes wrong.
Frankly, you have to be some weird sort of masochist, oops, unusually resilient, to put yourself through that knowing that you’re never going to shift the dial in any meaningful way.
This matters, because in a limited pool of potential candidates, those who can see the bigger picture are increasingly deterred from standing for all the reasons I’ve outlined.
Bluntly, you’ve more chance of making headlines over pavement surfing than fixing a broken housing market or controlling States’ expenditure. If you’re comfortable appealing to potential deputies on that basis, fine. But it’s not a foundation for securing Guernsey’s future over the next 50 years.
So next time you want to call your States member a traitor or savagely abuse them online for trying to move the needle, just reflect – they don’t have to do this.
And neither does anyone else who is sensible, rational or normal.
And see what sort of an Assembly that produces.
