By Helen Evans
DO you know how many arm’s-length bodies the Government of Jersey has? “No,” you say? It might well come as a surprise to learn that it seems no one else does either.
There is, to say the least, something of a grey area as to what an arm’s-length body of government is in this island. And, of course, if you don’t know what makes an entity an arm’s-length body then it follows as a consequence that you’re going to have some difficulty identifying which bodies count as such and how many of them there are.
One of the more surprising passages in the Comptroller and Auditor General’s report on Oversight of Arm’s Length Bodies published last week is the following, concerning the Arm’s Length Body Oversight Board (ALBOB) established by a previous government in 2020:
“ALBOB identified a wider list of over 130 entities that it considered were ALBs. The list, however, is inconsistent, contains some duplicate entries and excludes some entities.”
If you are in any doubt as to whether that can possibly really mean what it appears to, the next sentence confirms that it does:
“ALBOB is working to reduce and clarify the list that it uses.”
So, rather remarkably, the board established by a previous government in 2020 in order to oversee government arm’s-length bodies is currently, some four years later, still seeking to establish an accurate list of such bodies.
That surely leaves little or no room for doubt that not all is well as regards government oversight of its arm’s-length bodies.
It also tells of a past in which sometimes there has been a tendency to set up new entities without sufficient regard to whether they are needed at all or whether, if indeed they are needed, they should be arm’s-length bodies of government. That points to a somewhat poorly controlled and even chaotic establishment of quasi-government entities. The legacy is a mess in which even compiling an accurate list of arm’s-length bodies becomes a complex task and the precise status of some bodies is not clear.
Arm’s-length bodies of government include some bodies incorporated as companies wholly owned by the government to fulfil functions previously undertaken internally by the government – for example, Ports of Jersey and Andium Homes. Their status as arm’s-length bodies of government is clear, for they are specified in the 2019 Public Finances Law, though how the government exercises oversight over some of them may not be so clear in practice.
The arm’s-length bodies also include a number of other entities with a considerable variety of functions and it seems perhaps almost as much variety in their relationships with the government as in their functions.
The arm’s-length bodies include some whose only relationship with government seems to be that they are contracted to provide services and others whose only relationship with government is that they receive grant funding. In some cases it is far from clear why these have ever been classified as arm’s-length bodies.
As the Auditor and Comptroller General recommends, those whose relationship with government consists in their being contracted to provide services or their being recipients of government grant funding should surely not be included as such, with their relationship with government instead overseen as part of the governance of the relevant contracting or grant-awarded process.
The landscape of arm’s-length bodies as it currently stands is overly complex, which militates against good governance and appropriate government oversight. For those organisations that are appropriately classified as arm’s-length bodies it behoves the government to exercise suitable oversight as to the execution of their functions, which are carried out on behalf of government for the public good, and over the management of public money within those bodies.
Like many messes, it would have been easier to have avoided creating the current tangled mess in the first place rather than tidy it up after it had appeared. It is good that we have a public audit function in the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General. It is good too that we have the ALBOB established by a previous government, though unfortunate that the Comptroller and Auditor General reports that by 2023 it had rather lost the momentum seen following its establishment in 2020. It is to be hoped that the current government can grasp the nettle and untangle the complex web of arm’s-length bodies that have somehow sprung up with insufficient regard to governance and controls.
This is not among the more glamorous and vote-attracting tasks of government. But then neither is cutting down the size of the public service, which this government has shown its willingness to take on. That bodes well for tackling the need to improve oversight and governance of the arm’s-length bodies.
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Helen Evans is a qualified accountant and a lecturer in higher education, teaching mainly statistics and mathematics. She is chair of Reform Jersey.
