Mark Helyar reckons that unless we change the culture of the civil service we will never get States spending under control. I agree with him, but I think he is only looking at half the problem. Has he considered that our civil service might simply be a mirror image of the Assembly which is supposed to be controlling it?
Both seem addicted to spending other people’s money, both are remarkably secretive about what they get up to, and both are willing to defend their own little patches to the last man and the last bullet. The only real difference is that one lot are elected and the other lot aren’t. And, of course, the elected lot are the ones who keep handing over more money for the unelected lot to spend.
I don’t doubt that there are civil servants who would happily spend every penny they could lay their hands on. But where does the money come from? The Assembly votes the budgets, approves the policies and creates the services which then need people to run them. Having done all that, deputies express horror that the civil service costs so much. It’s rather like a farmer putting another dozen cows in the stable and then complaining about the amount of dung he has to shovel out.
And I suspect the same habits exist on both sides. A committee gets a budget and regards it as its own money, just as a department does. If anyone suggests reducing it, we hear about the dreadful consequences for services. We seldom hear a committee volunteering that it has rather more money than it needs. I can’t remember the last time a deputy stood up and announced that his committee had found a way to do the same job with fewer people and less money. Perhaps I missed that States meeting.
Which brings me to the current budget. The Assembly instructed Policy & Resources to undertake zero-based budgeting. Now I only have an O-level in maths, but I think I understand what zero means. You start from nothing and work out what you actually need. Yet the budgets seem to be based on what was spent last year, with inflation added and some adjustments made. We are now told about priority-based budgeting, which sounds rather grand, but I wonder whether anybody has actually asked why we are still doing all the things we were doing 10 years ago.
I don’t suppose anyone expected every States service to be rebuilt from scratch in a few months, but there is a difference between making a serious attempt to challenge expenditure and simply giving the old budget a fresh coat of paint. And if P&R can reinterpret an instruction from the Assembly, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when officers develop their own interpretations of what politicians have told them to do.
Then there is secrecy, something at which the States seems to excel. I am not suggesting every officer is deliberately hiding things, but we have developed a system where information appears to be something to be released only when absolutely necessary. The politicians are hardly shining examples of openness themselves. How often do we hear that something cannot be disclosed because it is commercially sensitive, even though it is our money being spent?
Remember the hospital modernisation budget. Officers had revised cost information in early 2023, but the political members of Health & Social Care were not told until December. In the meantime the Assembly had made decisions using figures which were already out of date. The independent review did not find a deliberate attempt to mislead, which is an important distinction, but how can politicians control spending if they don’t know what is going on?
And having finally been told, HSC then took further time to pass the information to P&R. So officers weren’t telling politicians and politicians weren’t promptly telling other politicians. I suppose we should be grateful that somebody eventually told somebody. It rather demonstrates my point that the two sides are not so different.
We had the Amherst School fencing business as well. Whatever the merits of the security arrangements, the public wanted to know what it cost and the States wasn’t particularly forthcoming. Commercial sensitivity again. Meanwhile we have school buildings needing maintenance, and I wonder who decided that fencing was a greater priority than some of the other work which needs doing. There may be a perfectly sensible answer, but why is it so difficult to get one?
Now look at Aurigny, where today’s news suggests another substantial injection of taxpayers’ money may be required. We own an airline which is forecasting a loss of £9.7m. this year and another £5.7m. next year. British Airways has entered the Heathrow route, which is one of the factors affecting Aurigny’s income. Economic Development is responsible for air policy, while STSB is responsible for overseeing our airline.
One committee can pursue a policy which encourages competition, while another has to deal with the financial consequences for the airline we own. I am not arguing that BA should be kept out to protect Aurigny. Competition can be very good for islanders. But surely somebody should be looking at the whole picture before decisions are made, rather than leaving one committee to pursue its objectives and another to explain why its business is losing money?
It seems STSB is now asking Economic Development to clarify what it actually wants Aurigny to do. Wouldn’t it have been better to sort that out before the airline needed another bailout? We have a small island with a small airport and a government in which the left hand doesn’t always seem to know what the right hand is doing. Perhaps that’s because each hand belongs to a different committee.
And that is precisely the sort of silo thinking which Deputy Helyar says he wants to eliminate from the civil service. Yet here we have an example of the political structure producing much the same problem. If the politicians cannot agree on a common policy, what hope have the officers who are supposed to implement it?
There is an interesting development over Guernsey Water too. The Assembly had agreed that it should be incorporated, putting it on a similar footing to Guernsey Electricity and Guernsey Post. But Deputy Helyar is now questioning whether that is really necessary. Apparently one of the attractions of incorporation is that it allows a trading entity to escape some of the States’ cumbersome procedures.
I rather like the deputy's response to that. Why spend money creating a company to escape the processes when you could simply change the processes? It seems an eminently sensible question, although it does rather beg another one. If the processes are so bad that our own trading businesses want to escape them, why have successive Assemblies allowed them to remain in place?
I am not against incorporation in principle. There are perfectly good reasons why commercial businesses shouldn’t have to ask politicians for permission every time they want to do something. But the important thing is deciding what politicians should control and what should be left to professional management. And that is rather different from politicians wanting to control everything when it suits them and disclaiming responsibility when it doesn’t.
The same confusion runs through the Assembly itself. Virtually every deputy sits on a committee, and naturally becomes an advocate for whatever that committee does. Health wants more for health, Education wants more for education, and everybody has a perfectly reasonable explanation for why their particular spending is essential. The trouble is that they are then expected to come together and decide whether the total is affordable.
It’s rather like asking the parish douzaine to decide how much each member should be allowed to spend on his own pet project, with the ratepayers picking up the bill. I suspect we’d soon have some splendid new parish facilities, although the ratepayers might be less enthusiastic.
I have long thought that one of the biggest weaknesses in the States is its reluctance to stop doing things. We introduce a new policy, hire people to implement it, establish a management structure and before long it becomes a permanent part of the machinery. Even when the original problem has disappeared, the staff and the expenditure somehow remain. Occasionally we discover that a service isn’t performing properly and the answer is to employ more people. I wonder how often the first question is whether the process itself is unnecessarily complicated.
Of course there are excellent people in the civil service, just as there are deputies who genuinely try to control expenditure. But individual good intentions are not enough when the system encourages everyone to protect their own budgets and keep their own counsel.
I support Deputy Helyar's efforts to change that culture. I want politicians to set policy, officers to implement it, and both to be accountable for what they do. I don’t want deputies interfering in every operational decision, any more than I want officers deciding policy without political authority. But I do want the people who vote away hundreds of millions of pounds of our money to accept responsibility for the consequences.
That brings me back to the mirror.
If the Assembly wants a civil service which spends carefully, shares information and puts the interests of Guernsey ahead of its own little empire, perhaps the Assembly ought to try doing those things itself.
Otherwise we might end up with the politicians demanding that the civil service changes its ways, while continuing to behave exactly as before. And if culture really does come from the top, as I believe it does, we shouldn’t be too surprised when nothing much changes further down.
The trouble with looking in the mirror is that sometimes you don’t much like what you see.
