How many cases are there of public sector employees getting paid for not doing what they were originally employed to do?

Thanks to St Helier Deputy Mike Higgins – a man who certainly knows where the Airport is and a good deal else about the place, I shouldn’t wonder – this small rock’s long-suffering taxpayers now know that someone working at Air Traffic Control is getting that for carrying out ‘minor administrative tasks’.

I would hazard a guess that it’s only in a place like this, where the upper echelons of the public sector’s hired help think that unless a figure has a handful of noughts after it then it’s not worth getting out of bed for, that an employee who seemingly failed to keep up with the qualifications essential to carrying out the task for which he has been employed can just stick around on the same money.

According to Deputy Higgins, the employee concerned has failed two essential radar exams. Instead of being told that, presumably, he can’t do what he’s paid to do and therefore cannot continue to be employed, the employee has been kept on doing those ‘minor administrative tasks’ – a euphemism, as I interpret it, for ensuring that everyone else in the office has got a regular supply of paper clips.

Of course, I could be wrong about the paper clips. Given that the minister in charge of this latest episode in the long-running farce otherwise known as the States of Jersey is Alan Maclean, it may well be that the bloke’s principal task is to ensure that none of the ring-binders in the department gets it in its head to turn from a passive bit of metal into a member of the government.

(That, for relatively new readers, is a reference to Senator Maclean not keeping his ring-binder under proper control and allowing it to hit the voting button on his desk in the Big House.)

It’s not the first time it’s been revealed that a public employee is being paid good money for either doing nothing or certainly not doing the full range of tasks for which they are paid.

It’s not that long ago that Health and Social Services admitted that there are medics on their books in that situation (the locums cost a small fortune, apparently), and further back in the not so dim and distant past that was the situation with some of the boys and girls in blue at the Kremlin in Rouge Bouillon, where it seemed that people were being suspended for inordinately lengthy periods for alleged breaches of discipline.

Instead of time-wasting debates with no better purpose than slapping the Chief Minister on the wrist – and then only if the proposition defied the snowball in hell analogy, which it was never going to do – perhaps the five Members who voted in favour of Deputy Trevor Pitman’s censure proposal could instead become more usefully employed.

They could start by establishing how many cases there are of public sector employees getting paid for not doing what they were originally employed to do. They could then set about framing a process which would impose rigid time limits on the period of inactivity (or close to it) so that the rest of us will at least think that we’re getting value for the money we’re shelling out.

IT’S many decades since I first learned to ride a bicycle. Unlike many of today’s children, I certainly didn’t get a new one every Christmas.

Indeed, come to think of it, I’ve never had a new bike. I’ve only ever had three or four, and they were paid for by me with money I had earned either on a paper round or by taking on jobs during the school holidays.

Later on, and despite the fact that I’d never had a lesson on how to ride a bike, I helped out in the early years of the extremely worthwhile cycling proficiency scheme and got a lot of fun out of it.

I would have thought that my own proficiency was about on a par with that of any adult, which is why I am extremely surprised, to say the least, that someone seems to have been appointed to train those police officers who are planning to get on their bikes –literally – in how to ride them.

It seems that all ten officers of this new mounted division volunteered for the job, so I presume that at the time they applied they knew what it entailed and therefore knew how to ride a bike.

Of course, there is the possibility that some of them didn’t have that skill but were exercising their ‘rights’ and would object on discrimination grounds if not selected. I really do hope that wasn’t the case. In which case what precisely are they being trained in?

Of course, it could be a case of the States Police hierarchy covering their backs in case one of the riders has an accident and argues that they weren’t properly trained. Such possibilities really do make me want to weep into my calvados.

AND finally … having just seen – and been told not too politely to go away – a seagull tucking in to the peanuts in one of Herself’s bird feeders, can I ask what happened to the lengthy period of monitoring that those of us who consider these dangerous pests to be akin to vermin were promised? I can remember that promise being made when a cull of urban gulls was mentioned.

However, like a lot of other things that are promised but never actually materialise, the paperwork is probably gathering dust in the hope that people like me either forget or go away.

I suppose it will take another child getting injured before anything is actually done.