Senator Sam Mézec, who chairs the Island’s only political party, Reform Jersey, said the process for unveiling the core strategic plans wass ‘drawn out’ and lacked the funding proposals needed to support the priorities.
The new Council of Ministers is due to lodge its strategic plan – which has been renamed the Common Strategic Policy – tomorrow.
The CSP will outline the government’s key focus areas for this term of office.
However, Treasury Minister Susie Pinel said yesterday that the policy did not contain any information about how the priorities will be funded.
And Senator Mézec has criticised previous governments for failing to include this information.
He said he was ‘proud’ of the input his party has had on the CSP, but that party politics would allow government priorities to be laid out more clearly. However, he said the ‘broad spectrum’ within the new ministerial team had created a ‘refreshing’ plan which represented the ‘new era of Jersey politics’.
‘We believe that the whole process of putting together a strategic plan for government is drawn out and made less certain because of the lack of party politics,’ he said.
‘In a party system, the CSP would be published very quickly after an election because it would simply be a re-jigged version of the winning party’s election manifesto. And, it would lay out the path for the revenue-raising proposals in that manifesto, so would have much clearer cost implications.
‘The current system we have is a product of our democratic system, which we are against. There is a better way of doing it, but it requires wholesale democratic change.’
The previous government’s plan, which was approved in 2015, set out five key priorities – sustainable public finances, improve health and wellbeing, improve education, optimise economic growth and improve St Helier.
Other States Members will be able to propose amendments to the plan, which is due to be debated on 20 November.
