Nine days.
That’s how long it took Mark Helyar’s officials to tell him of the presence of asbestos inside the fire station at Alderney Airport and the urgent evacuation of firefighters who may have been exposed to the toxic dust.
It would have been even longer than nine days, but they could avoid briefing him no longer after I found out and submitted questions to him, as the president of the States Trading Supervisory Board, which is politically and legally responsible for the islands’ ports.
The asbestos leak was inevitably a page one story.
It was always the type of incident about which the president could have been questioned by deputies or journalists at any moment. He might well have received a call from firefighters worried sick, especially as their union was also being kept in the dark longer than it should have been.
His board could be criminally liable if it negligently exposed its staff to such a hazard.
And yet officials who were aware on 24 September that urgent testing was under way, and on 5 October that asbestos had been found in nearly every one of more than a dozen samples, spent nine days comfortable that their president – the man ultimately responsible – was completely unaware of the incident.
This was no isolated case. Inadequate briefing of deputies – sometimes wilful, often complacent – is endemic in the States. Essential information is routinely kept from presidents and members of committees who require it and have a right to it.
They were kept in the dark about the closure of the diving platform at the Bathing Pools, about the addition of tens of millions of pounds to the cost of redeveloping the hospital, about the failure to erect new play apparatus at Saumarez Park following a public fundraising campaign, and about shutting off a busy beach car park in the middle of summer.
They are only a few quite recent examples of hundreds upon hundreds. An exhaustive list of such incidents would fill most of today’s newspaper. In my experience, Employment & Social Security is the one States office which does not routinely leave its committee exposed in this way.
Chief executive Boley Smillie is highly rated, deservedly so, and generally considered to have made a good start in an almost impossible job.
But he is not yet getting to grips with this problem in the relationship between politicians and officials.
He could do so, if he wished, by instructing senior officials to provide their committee presidents with daily briefings of the type common and expected in other jurisdictions, and dealing robustly with those who can’t or won’t.
Otherwise, at some point, enough politicians will find the courage to take the issue into their own hands, and the risk will be high of imperfect solutions developed in extremis.
Perhaps Deputy Helyar’s incipient requete, revealed in these pages today, which could prevent officials from making ‘novel, contentious or repercussive’ decisions, is not the answer.
If Policy & Resources has a better one, it needs to come to the table with it now.
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