A good time to bury bad news on the population?

From André Ferrari.

WAS the extraordinary news item about Jersey’s economy declining as its population rises, deliberately released just before Christmas to ensure most people didn’t notice it?

The lack of comment on an issue which many Islanders consider their number one concern, is astonishing.

Many of us never subscribed to the ‘grow the population’ policy created by past ministers. I for one never accepted that this could be done without adverse environmental impact on Jersey.

Indeed, the policy seemed to cut right across policies aimed at reducing Jersey’s carbon footprint, reducing car journeys, reducing waste, etc. The fact that such a contradiction in policies was never properly explained to us, was nothing less than ministerial dishonesty.

Such was the force with which this policy was pushed through, that even the full economic argument was never satisfactorily made. A full economic audit of whether an active, immigrant workforce would ‘pay for an ageing population’ (or simply add to growing pressure on schools, housing hospital, infrastructure costs) was never explained.

Of course, back in the past, many of the costs to the public purse from a growing population were simply left off the balance sheet, by denying immigrants benefits for years until they had earned their ‘quallies’.

But by the 21st Century Jersey had to adopt a fairer system, which allowed immigrants to obtain benefits after a much shorter period. And it was around this same time that our government went from playing a laissez-faire catch-up with the ever growing population, to one that actively sought to grow it.

The latest statistics blow that ‘policy’ right out of the water. Not only have we now got 10,000 more people here, but our economy has declined over the same 12-year period. That is utter madness, total lunacy. Wasn’t the policy of growing the population supposed to be about attracting skilled workers on high wages?

Yet the head of the States Statistics Unit says that ‘we have seen a great number of people coming in to do low-end jobs ….’ He also states the decline in living standards appears to be sharper for newcomers in the lower-paid jobs. So they will all be applying to Income Support to top up their meagre wages as soon as they possibly can. How did our past ministers, who rammed this policy down our throats, get it so utterly wrong?

Meanwhile, as incomes drop, so pressures on housing continue to rise, thus pushing up housing costs not only for the newly arrived, but everyone else here too. More pressure then on the Income Support bill, the cost of living and the cost of doing any business at all in this Island.

After half a century of constant house building, we still have the same shortage of affordable housing that we started with. Indeed I’m forced to wonder whether the ‘grow the population’ policy wasn’t actively skewed in favour of the construction industry.

Meanwhile, the streets of our town are full of faces and languages that originate from outside the EU. Someone somewhere is presumably granting licences for them all. So what on earth is going on here? Am I the only one who thinks that Jersey is now a basket case, with a declining economy propped up by a huge property bubble?

I believe that the statistics are proof that the population policy of our first Council of Ministers was bonkers. I could prefix ‘bonkers’ with a more robust word which would more accurately express my opinion. But I doubt that the JEP would print it.