The sports budget fiasco proves the process is faulty

Next week marks 100 days in office for the new Chief Minister, and already he has established himself as an effective leader.

It’s a pity, therefore, that he has also begun to show that he appears to suffer from the same – possibly fatal – illusion from which the previous regime suffered – the idea that there is a whole list of services that could be taken away from the States and handled better by the private or the third sector. It’s the enduring myth of small government.

I have to admit that it’s very tempting to believe that all the Island’s financial problems could be solved by dramatically cutting the number of things the government does, thus saving an awful lot of money and preserving our low-tax paradise. It’s a pity it doesn’t work.

Anyone who thinks it could only has to reflect on all the fuss surrounding the proposed reduction in the budget for sports. You would have thought that Island life as we know it was about to come to an end.

But not even the most committed member of the Small Society could place sport in the list of front-line services provided by the government. Or could they?

Sport, along with art and music, would appear to be an obvious target for the cost-cutters. It’s only when you start thinking about the health implications and the role sport plays in keeping youngsters fit and occupied that you begin to realise that it is a pretty important subject.

The same applies to other non-core functions provided by the States, such as the much-derided smoking cessation. This might not be a matter of life and death – well actually it is – but if you add up all the costs involved in treating Islanders with various diseases and maladies caused or made worse by smoking, then employing a few health cessation experts becomes a good investment.

Identifying the services that the States don’t need to provide is therefore extremely difficult and in the end comes down to what can be afforded. So if the Island’s finances are in such a mess that we can no longer pay to help sports clubs survive, there’s not much we can do about it. Their budgets are cut and you can’t give in to public pressure.

It means that you have to adopt the same approach as that suggested by one deputy in Guernsey recently. He said that the best way to tackle the increasing cost of the health service was to give the health department a smaller, fixed budget and let them get on with it. Presumably he didn’t have any members of his family on a hospital waiting list.

IN an organisation as big as the States of Jersey, there must be at least a few areas that could be cut back without anyone noticing, although government spending has been under such close scrutiny for so long that the scope can’t be great.

The much-vaunted Comprehensive Spending Review is supposed to be on track to achieve the £65 million in savings, and let’s hope this is the case, because we’re spending enough money on it. However, recent evidence would suggest that the CSR is a half-baked attempt at comprehensively reviewing States spending, which is what it says on the tin.

Once again, you only have to look at the fuss over the cutback in funding for sports clubs to appreciate how cack-handed the process has been. First the new minister takes the money away, although the decision was probably not made on his watch, and then the minister reinstates most of it because of the public outcry.

There’s obviously something not quite joined-up here; it certainly doesn’t give the appearance of a well thought-out, professionally conducted process.

If the experts conducting the CSR had come to the conclusion that the sports money should be dramatically reduced, why was it such a surprise to everyone, including, it appeared, the minister? Surely if they were seriously looking at reducing the grant, they actually spoke to the sports council about it first?

You never know, they might have found a compromise which wouldn’t produce the dramatic impact everyone complained about. Indeed, a subsequent press statement from the Education, Sport and Culture department said that the proposed cut was ‘unviable and could destabilise sporting activity and affect sports participation in the Island’. Sorry, who was it who proposed the cut?

In defence of the department, they only did so because the money has already been taken out of their budget in the CSR process. Backtracking means they are now short of £84,000 in CSR savings, which will require cuts elsewhere.

Everyone will have their favourite target for those compensatory cuts, but only in areas that do not have any impact on them. Indeed, cutting the sports budget might still be the best option, in which case the department should have stuck to its guns, and not flip-flopped. But not discussing the original proposals with the sports council first weakens their argument, particularly as now the new minister has reinstated most of the grant.

This fiasco doesn’t bode well for the CSR process. The £84,000 lost by Education, Sport and Culture bowing to public pressure is small compared to the total target of £65 million, but who knows how many other departments are working on cuts the public won’t like when they are eventually revealed?

Unfortunately, that’s what you get when you introduce panic measures because the budget doesn’t balance. The CSR process was hastily thought-out and, as the experience with the sports budget shows, poorly executed in places.

Hopefully we have now learned the lessons and we can proceed with a genuine review of how taxpayers’ money is spent, and not just wield the hatchet.

CSR should indeed identify those areas which can be hived off from the States and where genuine savings can be made. It may be, for example, that there could be more private support for the Sports Council instead of having to rely on the taxpayer.

The trouble is that local sports already rely a lot on private sponsorship, so there may not be much more private money, particularly during a recession. So sports would have to suffer simply because we can’t afford it.

We are only talking peanuts in terms of the total States budget, of course. So will CSR uncover large chunks of the public administration which could be closed down or passed over to the private sector (should they want it)? I doubt it.

Will CSR reduce manpower costs (by far the biggest item of expenditure) without cutting essential services, such as health and education? Of course there is scope for savings, but there is also a growing demand. So the prospects for small government are slim unless we are prepared to reduce our standard of living.

We might have to if we really can’t afford it. But you just ask the members of the Sports Council whether they would like small government.

Peter Body is editor of Business Brief magazine