JERSEY should stop “behaving like a big country” and avoid “aspirational” spending on the imported standards of larger jurisdictions, the Island’s most senior civil servant has said as he launched a stinging criticism of the £1.3 billion spend on public services.
Government chief executive Andrew McLaughlin said that the government takes responsibility for areas that it has neither the budget nor personnel to do well, creating strain on the Island’s limited resources.
And, in a strongly-worded indictment of the Island’s system of governance, he raised concerns that “the aspirational, non-prioritised nature of Jersey politics has led us to a position where things that really need [to be] funded sometimes don’t get it, and things that I would regard as discretionary do get money”.
Approved by the States Assembly in December, the latest Budget includes planned spending of £1.28bn on delivering public services in 2026.
Speaking at a Public Accounts Committee hearing yesterday, Mr McLaughlin, who is a senior banker by trade, said: “I genuinely struggle to understand why the public service has to spend more than £1bn to run in Jersey.
“So that means to me there’s a couple of hundred million which might be best going into reserves and then doing stuff when you have to.”
Concerns over the need to bolster the Island’s Strategic Reserve and Stabilisation Fund have been raised consistently in recent years by the the Fiscal Policy Panel, which provides advice on public finances.
In a report released last year, the panel warned that “the trajectory of day-to-day spending is unsustainable given Jersey’s revenues, and will need to be curtailed in future Budgets” and that “high levels of public spending, especially on services, is likely to add to existing inflationary pressures”.
Mr McLaughlin told the committee that the government “takes on stuff it probably doesn’t have the budgets or the capacities to do really well and it turns into operational risk”.
Asked for an example, he said: “Let’s take the fire service – we’ve adopted, effectively, UK fire standards in all shapes and forms.
“It’s quite difficult for such a small fire service in such a small island to transpose UK-generated standards into our small island environment.
“In order for them to do [that] they therefore have to access resources, money, to put that in place.”
He later warned that “Jersey is losing its distinctiveness because it’s behaving like a big country when it’s a small country”.
He contended that the Island loses its economic, cultural and social edge when it “tries to be like everyone else”.
“When you’re a small island economy, who, remarkably, has grown this £4bn finance centre on it, it’s actually quite difficult to compare yourself to other people.
“This is really important, because this obsession with comparative analysis, rather than sitting back and saying ‘what have we got here? Who are we? What have we got? How can we earn our keeping the world?’ It’s Oscar Wilde – be yourself,” he added.
“Everyone else is taken. Jersey just needs to be itself.”
Mr McLaughlin was also asked if he would have expected to have had more influence within his time as chief executive.
He said: “No, because I understand Jersey politics and the political system”.
Chief Minister Lyndon Farnham has previously confirmed that Mr McLaughlin will leave his government post at the end of December 2026. Mr McLaughlin initially took up the post in September 2023 on a nine-month contract but this has since been extended to the end of this year.
