Pity no one told him how the system works before letting him out on his own

Roy Le Hérissier’s proposal to have land adjacent to the former Jersey Dairy site at Five Oaks rezoned to stop its development met with the approval of a majority of our elected representatives last week.

The difficulty Senator Freddie Cohen finds himself in is that it appears he gave a nod or a wink – or perhaps even both, generous little fellow that he is – to Dandara indicating that they could build a small number of homes on the field.

What on earth possessed him to give any sort of indication in advance of a formal planning application finding its way to his ‘In’ tray is mind-boggling but perhaps indicative of the way this ministerial government works in practice.

It’s either that or a demonstration of the folly of giving high office to someone as soon as they’ve been elected. As a former columnist used to observe, it takes that lot in the Big House a year to find the toilet when they’re first elected.

I have to say – and I’m trying hard to restrain from smiling – that Dandara are now in precisely the same position as scores of us crapauds have found ourselves in ever since Planning was called the Natural Beauties Committee. Those were the days when it was easier to get blood out of a stone than it was to get a plot approved.

Even if you attempted to get on friendly terms with any of the officers or the seven politicians who made the final decisions, the invariable comment from all of them would be nothing stronger than while they couldn’t see a great deal wrong with the application, it should be remembered that the final decision did not rest with them – the perfect let-out for the difficulty the Planning Minister finds himself in right now.

It’s a pity no one thought to tell him something about how the system should actually work before letting him out on his own without a minder.

As it is, it will be interesting to see what happens next. Does a rare example of real democracy in action – the vote on Deputy Le Hérissier’s proposition against development – lead to the threat of litigation from the would-be developer against the Planning Minister?

But while it will be interesting to see how this one pans out, that assumes that those of us who foot the bills will actually be told – and there’s no such thing as a racing certainty when it comes to freedom of information.

MY comment last week about Health and Social Services ‘saving’ 900 grand by simply transferring the liability to another citizens’ pockets source drew the anticipated deafening silence from those who could have refuted it, so I must assume that my conclusion must be correct.

It drew an interesting online comment from someone who sounds as if he has real experience of the system. He made the interesting observation that despite a lot of lip service to the contrary, most senior civil servants consider that their loyalty is to their department, rather than the States or the community as a whole.

The commentator goes on to suggest that until politicians start talking to rank and file staff and actually listening to what they say, they are going to get nowhere.

As he put it: ‘Such an approach would not only reveal a lot of valuable information about management weakness, poor working practices and stuff disappearing out of the back door (yes, it does happen), but just as important, if politicians directly asked the ”Indians” for help and advice, morale among people who feel constantly under undeserved attack would shoot up.’

It’s funny, but I always thought such matters were included in the functions of the all-singing, all-dancing scrutiny committees. It would certainly pay them to carry out such an exercise – not in their public sessions, but through some other means in which recriminations against staff blowing whistles would be minimised.

And before someone tells me that such recriminations don’t exist, virtually everyone employed in the public sector knows that they do. Anyone in a lowly position who, let’s say, wins an appeal against a disciplinary sanction will know very well that being marginalised, with the tacit approval of the boss, it seems, makes success taste very bitter indeed. In terms of the lack of productivity which comes with it, it also comes at a heavy cost to us taxpayers.

I HAVE always been led to believe – principally by the public utterances of a succession of senior politicians from Cyril Le Marquand to the first two chief ministers we’ve had – that in order to attract people of the sort of calibre needed to run public sector departments, we had to pay them top whack.

What I didn’t realise was that top whack was measured in such outrageous terms that, give or take the employers’ pension and social security payments which are included in the salary package, we could actually have got the Cabinet Secretary or the Chief of the Defence Staff from the UK for much the same money as we’re shelling out for Mr Ogley, the bloke who seemingly got away with binning the hand-written notes he made when suspending the most senior police officer in the Island.

As an aside, I actually think it is insulting and outrageous that Bill Ogley pulls down more than the Bailiff, but that’s another story for perhaps another day.

AND finally … I know I keep on saying this, but why is everybody so euphoric because they’ve discovered that an ‘extra’ £20 million unexpectedly made its way into the States coffers last year? Sounds to me like another Treasury cock-up. I wonder if it was in euros.