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Patchy end of term report for Council of Ministers
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The report not only sets out an impressive list of achievements by the outgoing Council of Ministers, it graphically illustrates how little progress has been made in some areas, and how some vital issues have been ignored altogether.
The recently published progress report is one of those documents where you can find plenty of evidence to support your own ideas and prejudices, whatever they happen to be. To some the report will be a glowing tribute to the hard work put in by the Council of Ministers and the States, while to others it will be a damning indictment of long-term neglect.
For example, some people will read the section on the pending energy policy as a positive move in a difficult area. Others will point out that we’ve been waiting for this for years. Many will also be delighted at the progress made by installing seven new bus shelters, but others will wonder why this pretty basic amenity has taken for ever to create.
So as an assessment of how well the retiring Council of Ministers has done, it’s pretty patchy, but I’m surprisingly positive and personally believe that the report should make ministers proud of what they have accomplished. Getting anything done during the worst recession in living memory is an achievement in itself.
However, while the Council of Ministers can bask in the glory of progress made, the important thing about the report is that it shows what is still to be done to try and hit a moving target. Perhaps even more importantly, the tremendous amount of detail and minutiae contained in the document does not obscure the general approach and priorities of the COM, and it’s policies not ticked boxes, that they should be judged on. That’s where I have difficulty with the outgoing COM because I believe that their priorities have been, and remain, a bit skewed.
No one can object to the over-arching aim of the COM and that’s ‘working together to meet the needs of the community’. But that’s a pointless statement that says nothing. Even the Chief Minister’s elaboration on this aim doesn’t reveal the council’s main priorities. In order to address Island challenges, the Chief Minister says that the COM ‘would support the Island during the economic downturn, reform the public service to maximise efficiency and reduce costs, protect those who are most vulnerable in our society, and take care of our environment and strive to fulfill our global responsibilities.’ Well, of course we will. What else can we do? But that still doesn’t reveal the priorities of the COM.
While the COM may believe that they can juggle all of the balls in the air at the same time, it is simply not possible in a small jurisdiction such as Jersey to do everything at once. The Island does not have the government resources or the size of administration to push through more than a couple of major initiatives at any one time. Despite the well-known prejudice of some businessmen and the public, there are not numerous layers of managers and administrators sitting around doing very little other than waiting for their index-linked pension. Skills in the public sector are scarce and costly, and only so much can be achieved at once. It’s all very well coming up with 52 pages of policy targets, but priorities have to be set.
It’s interesting that despite all of the strategy statements, business plans and policy reviews, it’s very difficult to determine what the Council of Ministers’ priorities are. They presumably have priorities but they don’t tell us about them and, of course, with a system of government that’s not fit for purpose, we don’t have to worry about trivial matters such as policy at election time. Certainly there’s nothing approaching a ‘vision’ in our government or if there is one, it’s certainly not been transmitted to me.
But ‘by their deeds shall you know them’, and the only way to determine the COM’s priorities is in their actions, and that’s where I become less positive.
It’s pretty obvious that the COM has been swept along by events which is hardly surprising. We were already facing a budget shortfall because of the introduction of zero/10 when the recession hit and made things much worse. I’ve said in the past that the COM panicked, and there is no doubt that they certainly moved quickly, perhaps without sufficient thought.
They also had the example of the panic in the UK to guide them, even though the financial position was very different, and critics in the business community and the public have complained for years about excessive government spending. So in a classic knee-jerk reaction, the COM’s number one priority became cutting spending (even if they said that it was only one prong of a three-pronged approach).
The ministers did appreciate that cuts would take time to improve the financial position, so some increase in tax was also required. The States reluctantly agreed on a GST rate of 5%, apparently in the belief that this was all that was required to balance income and spending. By common consensus this has now become the accepted upper limit of GST for the foreseeable future. If there is a continuing shortfall between revenue and expenditure, it will have to be redressed by cutting spending even further.
To my mind this obscures what should be the first priority of the Council of Ministers, but which doesn’t even form part of the Strategic Plan and therefore doesn’t feature in the progress report. Rather than plucking figures out of the air for how much spending needs to be cut or savings made, Jersey should decide what kind of public services it believes its citizens should aspire to. Then it has to decide how this money is to be found, which may well mean higher taxes.
That raises a whole host of questions about which taxes could be increased or introduced because obviously the Island has to remain competitive as a financial centre. But this is not even being discussed because the Council of Ministers and perhaps the Island as a whole are failing to face the unpalatable. The tax burden has already shifted to individuals, the finance industry has changed and Islanders now have to pay the full price for the public services they consume. Tinkering with those services and a so-called restructuring of the public service, which now appears to be the number one priority, is just avoiding the main issue.
So while the Council of Ministers can justifiably point to a good deal of progress in meeting the objectives of the Strategic Plan, that’s not the same as tackling the most difficult problems facing the Island. That should be the number one priority but it looks like that will be left to the new Council of Ministers.
Peter Body is the editor of Business Brief magazine
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