SENIOR politicians have been made departmental growth bids totalling £40 million, the Treasury Minister has said ahead of the 2027 Budget being released this month – despite concerns over public spending and spiralling government costs.
Senator Alan Maclean, who returned to the Assembly this summer after an eight-year absence from politics, said that many of the bids for additional departmental funds were not deemed to be “critical” by his team and were unlikely to be supported.
The Treasury Minister confirmed during a hearing with the Corporate Services Scrutiny Panel that a number of bids for “emergency” funding had been submitted.
“We did point out to departments that if there was an emergency requirement for funding for 2027, then that would be looked at,” Senator Maclean said. “We weren’t quite expecting there to be £40m of emergency, but that’s the matter that we’re dealing with at the moment – it is a significant sum of money.
“We made it clear that we were aiming for a neutral budget and that we weren’t seeking growth bids, and then we received a significant number of growth bids – these are all deemed [by the departments] to be critical, but we don’t believe a number of them are.
“Officers are closely assessing all of those bids to see if any do need to be supported or not – a lot of them we don’t believe do need to be [supported], or can be ‘reprofiled’ to later years.”
While details of the growth bids have not been revealed, it is understood that health and education feature prominently among them.
Senator Maclean admitted that the situation had created a challenge for him after returning to the Treasury seat that he formerly occupied between 2014 and 2018.
He referred to the £118m deficit in the government’s balance sheet for 2025 and his determination to tackle this area in the Budget.
“I am seeking to go towards a culture in the Council of Ministers of returning to where public finances were some years ago with a state of prudence and balance,” he said.
Referring to an “extraordinary” increase in health spending in recent years, Senator Maclean said close attention was required in order to track the results of such investment. The focus on waiting lists, with £5m being spent annually to achieve reductions, was an example he gave, with an expectation that such work would achieve positive results and deliver best value for Islanders.
Once the Budget is lodged, there will be a ten-week period in which detailed Scrutiny will take place and States Members, or Scrutiny panels, will be entitled to lodge amendments, although the Treasury Minister said that this would create further challenges.
“It’s going to be very difficult, I’m afraid,” he said. “Contingencies are very tight, and I think in reality the only way that changes can be accommodated without involving the use of reserves or, dare I say, debt would be reprioritisation, taking a budget from somewhere else.”
Other topics discussed were the forecast income from the new Pillar 2 corporate tax regime, which Senator Maclean said would be £49m in 2027, rising slightly each year to £55m in 2030.
Comptroller of Revenue Richard Summersgill told the panel that the latest figure for the proportion of Islanders to file tax returns online was 58%.
Mr Summersgill admitted that Jersey was trailing behind other jurisdictions in this regard, but had only introduced the online option in 2020, whereas the first moves toward online filing in the UK had been initiated in the 1990s.
Senator Maclean said he recognised that some older Islanders were uncomfortable with online filing, and that he did not intend to make this compulsory, although there was a drive to increase the numbers.
